Who was Caravaggio's black-winged god of love? What secrets this masterpiece reveals about the rebellious artist
A young lad cries out while his head is firmly gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural account. It seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his neck with a single turn. Yet Abraham's preferred method involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his other hand, ready to slit the boy's neck. One definite aspect remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
The artist adopted a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold right in front of the viewer
Standing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a real face, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly black pupils – features in two other paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his dark feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly lit unclothed form, standing over toppled-over items that include musical devices, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the same unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many times previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening immediately in front of you.
However there existed a different aspect to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he came in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the holy metropolis's eye were everything but devout. That could be the absolute earliest resides in London's art museum. A youth opens his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent vase.
The adolescent sports a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned female courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for sale.
What are we to make of Caravaggio'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 1980s. The complex past reality is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art historians improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.
His early works do offer overt erotic implications, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, identified with the city's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to another initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his robe.
A few annums after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with important church commissions? This unholy pagan deity revives the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A British visitor viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.
The painter had been deceased for about 40 years when this account was recorded.
