What was the black-winged god of love? The secrets this masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist
A youthful boy screams as his skull is forcefully held, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical account. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single turn. Yet the father's preferred method involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his remaining palm, ready to cut Isaac's throat. One definite element stands out – whomever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed remarkable expressive skill. Within exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally deep grief that a protector could abandon him so completely.
The artist took a familiar biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen directly in front of the viewer
Viewing before the artwork, observers identify this as a real face, an accurate record of a young model, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost dark pupils – appears in two other works by the master. In each instance, that highly emotional visage commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness acquired on the city's streets, his black plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed child creating riot in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely real, vividly lit nude form, straddling toppled-over objects that include musical devices, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Cupid depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the same unusual-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a city enflamed by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed many times before and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening directly in front of the spectator.
However there existed another side to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy city's attention were anything but holy. That may be the very earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his red lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy room mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent vase.
The boy sports a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female prostitute, clutching a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators ever since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the artist was not the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain art historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.
His initial paintings indeed offer explicit sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to another initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at you as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his garment.
A several annums after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his early works but in a more intense, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about forty years when this account was documented.
