What was Caravaggio's black-winged deity of love? The secrets this masterwork uncovers about the rebellious artist
A youthful boy cries out while his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his other palm, ready to cut Isaac's throat. A certain element remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary expressive skill. Within exists not just fear, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but also profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
He took a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in view of you
Viewing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost dark eyes – appears in two other works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly emotional visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on the city's streets, his dark plumed wings demonic, a unclothed child running riot in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London museum, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a very real, brightly illuminated nude form, straddling overturned objects that comprise stringed devices, a musical score, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Cupid depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, just prior to this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he poses naked – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master created his three portrayals of the identical unusual-looking youth in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a city enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been portrayed many occasions previously and make it so new, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be happening directly in front of the spectator.
Yet there existed a different aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, only skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were everything but devout. What may be the absolute first resides in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his red mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman courtesan, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the artist was not the queer icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as some art scholars unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His early works do make overt sexual implications, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to an additional initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares calmly at you as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.
A few years after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly established with important church commissions? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about forty annums when this story was recorded.
