Who was Caravaggio's black-winged deity of love? What insights this masterpiece reveals about the rebellious artist
A young lad cries out while his head is forcefully gripped, a massive digit digging into his face as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary turn. However the father's preferred method involves the silvery steel knife he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to cut the boy's throat. One certain element remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so utterly.
The artist adopted a well-known biblical tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in front of you
Standing in front of the artwork, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost dark pupils – appears in several other works by the master. In every instance, that highly expressive visage commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his dark plumed wings demonic, a naked adolescent creating riot in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Viewers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly lit unclothed figure, standing over toppled-over items that include musical instruments, a music manuscript, metal armour and an architect's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the melancholic mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master painted his three images of the same unusual-appearing kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous times previously and render it so new, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be happening immediately before you.
Yet there existed a different aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, just skill and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but devout. That may be the absolute first resides in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the murky waters of the glass container.
The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His initial paintings indeed offer overt erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, observers might look to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark sash of his robe.
A few years after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost respectable with important church commissions? This profane pagan god resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about forty years when this story was documented.
