Who exactly was Caravaggio's dark-feathered deity of love? What secrets that masterwork reveals about the rogue artist
A young boy screams while his head is firmly gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical account. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his son, could break his neck with a solitary turn. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his remaining hand, ready to slit Isaac's throat. A definite aspect remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive skill. Within exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
The artist took a well-known biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold right in front of you
Viewing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost dark eyes – features in several other paintings by the master. In every case, that highly expressive face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his black plumed wings demonic, a unclothed child creating riot in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a very tangible, vividly lit nude form, standing over toppled-over items that include stringed devices, a music manuscript, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love painted blind," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this work was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes directly at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed numerous times before and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.
However there was another aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no teacher or patron in the urban center, just talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the holy city's attention were anything but holy. What could be the very earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth parts his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass container.
The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for purchase.
What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain art historians improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.
His initial paintings indeed make overt sexual suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, viewers might look to an additional early creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.
A few annums following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly established with important church commissions? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 annums when this story was documented.
