Who exactly was the black-winged deity of love? What secrets that masterpiece reveals about the rebellious artist
A youthful lad cries out while his head is firmly gripped, a large digit pressing into his face as his parent's powerful palm holds him by the throat. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the tormented youth from the biblical narrative. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a single twist. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his remaining palm, prepared to cut the boy's neck. One definite element remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable acting skill. There exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.
The artist took a well-known scriptural story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen directly in front of you
Standing in front of the painting, observers recognize this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark eyes – features in several other paintings by the master. In every instance, that richly expressive face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a very real, brightly lit nude figure, straddling toppled-over objects that include musical devices, a music score, metal armor and an architect's T-square. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy mess is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted blind," penned the Bard, shortly before this work was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares straight at you. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he poses naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three images of the same distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring directly before you.
However there existed a different side to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, just talent and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy city's eye were everything but holy. That could be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.
The boy sports a pink blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.
How are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was neither the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.
His initial paintings indeed offer explicit erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, observers might look to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at you as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his garment.
A several annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan deity revives the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been deceased for about 40 annums when this account was documented.
