What exactly was the black-winged deity of love? What secrets that masterpiece uncovers about the rogue artist
A youthful boy cries out as his skull is forcefully held, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a single twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his remaining hand, prepared to slit the boy's neck. One definite element remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not only dread, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but also profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
The artist took a familiar biblical story and made it so fresh and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in front of the viewer
Viewing before the artwork, observers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a young model, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost dark pupils – features in two other works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive visage commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his black plumed appendages sinister, a naked child running riot in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a London museum, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated nude form, standing over overturned objects that include stringed devices, a musical score, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy mess is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Love sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly before this work was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a city ignited by religious revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many times before and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring directly before the spectator.
Yet there existed a different side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, just talent and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy city's attention were anything but holy. That may be the absolute earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A young man opens his red mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.
The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his hair – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern art. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master represented a renowned woman courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for sale.
What are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.
His early paintings do make explicit erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might look to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black sash of his garment.
A few annums after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art patron the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan deity revives the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 years when this account was documented.
