What was the dark-feathered god of love? The insights this masterwork uncovers about the rogue artist
The youthful lad screams as his head is firmly held, a massive thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic grey blade he holds in his other palm, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. A certain aspect remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary acting skill. Within exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.
The artist adopted a familiar biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold right in view of you
Viewing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a young subject, because the same youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly dark pupils – appears in several additional works by the master. In each case, that highly emotional face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark feathery wings demonic, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely real, vividly illuminated nude figure, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise musical devices, a music score, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Cupid depicted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just before this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three portrayals of the same distinctive-looking kid in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been depicted numerous occasions 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 another aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, just talent and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were anything but holy. What could be the very first hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his red lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's dismal room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent container.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.
What are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was not the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His initial paintings do offer explicit erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, aligned with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to another early creation, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his robe.
A few annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy pagan god revives the erotic challenges of his early works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about forty years when this story was recorded.