Who was Caravaggio's black-winged deity of love? What insights that masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist
A youthful lad cries out while his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive digit digging into his face as his parent's powerful palm holds him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his remaining palm, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. A certain element stands out – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable acting skill. Within exists not only fear, shock and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally profound grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.
The artist took a well-known scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to happen directly in front of you
Viewing in front of the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost black eyes – appears in two additional works by Caravaggio. In every case, that richly emotional visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his black feathery wings demonic, a unclothed child creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a very real, vividly lit nude figure, straddling overturned objects that include musical instruments, a music manuscript, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love painted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly before this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious painter in a city ignited by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed many occasions before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be happening directly before you.
However there was another side to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, only talent and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy metropolis's eye were everything but devout. That could be the very earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his red mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.
The boy sports a pink blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but known through images, Caravaggio represented a famous female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for sale.
How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some artistic historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His early works indeed make overt sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to another initial work, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.
A several years after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan god resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, uneasy way. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A English traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 annums when this account was recorded.
