What exactly was the black-winged deity of love? What secrets this masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
The youthful lad screams as his skull is forcefully held, a massive thumb digging into his face as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. However the father's chosen approach involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his other palm, ready to cut Isaac's neck. One definite element stands out – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not just dread, shock and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
He took a familiar biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to happen directly in front of you
Viewing before the painting, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a young model, because the same youth – recognizable by his disheveled hair and nearly black eyes – appears in several additional paintings by the master. In every case, that highly expressive visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the shadows while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his black feathery wings sinister, a naked child creating riot in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly lit unclothed form, standing over overturned items that include stringed devices, a music score, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love depicted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just before this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master created his multiple images of the same unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a city enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many occasions previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring directly in front of you.
Yet there existed another side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a artist in his early twenties with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the sacred metropolis's attention were everything but devout. What may be the very first hangs in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see the painter's gloomy room reflected in the murky waters of the transparent container.
The boy sports a pink blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous woman courtesan, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.
What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain art historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His initial paintings indeed make overt erotic suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might look to an additional early work, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark sash of his garment.
A several years after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan deity revives the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a more intense, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed 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 deceased for about forty years when this story was recorded.
