Who exactly was the black-winged deity of desire? The secrets that masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
The young boy cries out while his head is forcefully gripped, a massive digit pressing into his face as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the neck. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his son, could break his neck with a single turn. Yet the father's chosen method involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his remaining hand, prepared to cut the boy's neck. A certain element remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed remarkable acting ability. There exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but also deep grief that a protector could abandon 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 view of you
Viewing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate record of a young model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly dark pupils – features in two additional works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly emotional face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his black plumed wings sinister, a unclothed child running chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a very real, vividly illuminated nude figure, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted blind," wrote the Bard, just prior to this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master painted his multiple images of the same unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted many occasions before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring directly in front of you.
However there existed a different aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the holy city's attention were anything but holy. That may be the very first resides in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: observers can see the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the glass vase.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his hair – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for purchase.
How are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on film in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as some art historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.
His early paintings do offer explicit erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to another initial work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his robe.
A few annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost respectable with important church commissions? This profane pagan god revives the erotic provocations of his early works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty years when this story was recorded.
