Who exactly was Caravaggio's black-winged deity of love? What insights that masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist
A youthful boy screams while his head is firmly held, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand holds him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his son, could break his neck with a single twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the silvery grey blade he holds in his other hand, prepared to cut the boy's neck. A certain element stands out – whoever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated remarkable acting ability. There exists not just dread, shock and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally deep grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
He took a well-known biblical story and made it so fresh and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in front of you
Standing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost dark pupils – features in several other paintings by the master. In every instance, that richly emotional visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark feathery wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with often painful desire, is shown as a very tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed form, standing over toppled-over objects that include stringed devices, a music manuscript, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melancholy – save here, the melancholic disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid painted blind," penned the Bard, just before this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the identical unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a biblical story that had been depicted many times before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of you.
Yet there existed a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he came in Rome in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a artist in his early twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, only talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the holy city's attention were everything but holy. What could be the very earliest hangs in London's art museum. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his hair – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through photographs, the master portrayed a famous female prostitute, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.
His initial paintings indeed make overt sexual implications, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine gazes calmly at you as he begins to undo the dark sash of his garment.
A several annums following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with important church projects? This unholy pagan god resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling way. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about forty years when this story was documented.
