What exactly was Caravaggio's black-winged god of desire? The secrets this masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist
The youthful boy cries out while his skull is firmly gripped, a large digit pressing into his face as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the throat. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a single turn. However the father's chosen method involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his remaining hand, prepared to slit the boy's neck. A certain aspect remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally deep grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
The artist adopted a familiar biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in view of the viewer
Viewing before the painting, observers identify this as a real countenance, an accurate record of a young model, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost black eyes – appears in several other paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly expressive visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed wings demonic, a naked child running riot in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly lit unclothed form, straddling toppled-over items that comprise stringed instruments, a music manuscript, metal armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Love depicted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this work was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the same unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been depicted many times previously and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring directly in front of you.
Yet there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, just skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred city's eye were anything but devout. That could be the absolute earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A young man opens his red lips in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.
The boy sports a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex trade in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio represented a famous woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His initial works do offer explicit erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young creator, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might look to another initial work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black sash of his garment.
A several years following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly established with important church projects? This unholy non-Christian god revives the erotic challenges of his early works but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about forty years when this story was documented.