Who was the dark-feathered god of love? The secrets this masterwork reveals about the rogue artist
A young lad screams while his head is firmly held, a massive thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful hand holds him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to slit the boy's throat. A certain element stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable acting ability. There exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but also profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
The artist took a well-known biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to happen right in view of the viewer
Viewing before the artwork, viewers recognize this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a young model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his tousled hair and almost dark eyes – features in several other works by the master. In each case, that richly expressive face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his black feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly lit nude figure, straddling overturned objects that include musical devices, a music manuscript, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save in this case, the gloomy mess is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love depicted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three portrayals of the same unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a city enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many times before and render it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring directly before you.
However there existed a different side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he came in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's attention were anything but devout. That may be the very first hangs in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent container.
The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through photographs, the master represented a famous female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic scholars unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His early paintings do offer explicit sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional initial work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares coolly at you as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.
A several annums following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with prestigious church projects? This unholy pagan deity revives the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a more intense, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English visitor viewed the painting 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 Francesco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was recorded.
