What exactly was the black-winged god of desire? The secrets that masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
A young boy screams as his skull is firmly held, a large digit pressing into his face as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. However the father's chosen approach involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his other palm, ready to cut the boy's throat. A definite aspect stands out – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work demonstrated remarkable expressive skill. There exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but also profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
He took a familiar scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen right in view of you
Viewing in front of the artwork, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost dark pupils – appears in two other works by the master. In each case, that highly emotional visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on the city's alleys, his black plumed wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a well-to-do dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated unclothed form, straddling toppled-over items that comprise musical devices, a music manuscript, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, just before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three portrayals of the same distinctive-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous times before and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be happening directly in front of you.
However there existed another aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only skill and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy city's attention were everything but devout. That may be the absolute first resides in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his red lips in a scream of pain: while reaching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.
The boy sports a pink blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern art. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through images, the master represented a famous female prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex past reality is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.
His initial paintings do offer overt erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, identified with the city's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark sash of his garment.
A several annums after the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 annums when this account was documented.
