What was the black-winged deity of love? The secrets that masterwork reveals about the rogue artist
A youthful lad screams as his head is firmly gripped, a massive digit pressing into his face as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. It seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen method involves the silvery grey blade he holds in his other hand, ready to cut Isaac's neck. One definite aspect remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work demonstrated remarkable acting ability. There exists not only fear, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.
He took a familiar scriptural tale and made it so fresh and raw that its terrors seemed to happen directly in view of the viewer
Viewing before the artwork, observers identify this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the same youth – recognizable by his tousled hair and nearly black pupils – appears in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a naked child creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, standing over overturned objects that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, metal armour and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Cupid depicted blind," penned Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes directly at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed many occasions previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be happening immediately before you.
However there existed a different side to the artist, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, just skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the sacred metropolis's eye were anything but holy. That may be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's dismal room reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.
The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through images, the master portrayed a renowned female prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain art historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His early paintings indeed make explicit sexual implications, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might look to an additional early work, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his robe.
A several years following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly established with prestigious church projects? This profane non-Christian deity revives the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a more intense, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid 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 identity of this adolescent was Cecco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was recorded.
