What exactly was Caravaggio's dark-feathered god of desire? What insights that masterwork uncovers about the rebellious artist
The youthful boy cries out as his head is forcefully gripped, a large digit pressing into his cheek as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the throat. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary twist. However the father's chosen approach involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his other hand, ready to slit Isaac's neck. A definite aspect stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated remarkable acting skill. There exists not just dread, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also profound grief that a protector could betray him so completely.
He adopted a well-known scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold right in view of the viewer
Viewing before the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate record of a young subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost dark eyes – features in two other works by the master. In each instance, that highly expressive visage commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's streets, his black feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed child running riot in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely real, brightly illuminated nude figure, standing over toppled-over items that include stringed instruments, a music manuscript, metal armour and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the ground in the German master's engraving Melancholy – except here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, shortly before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he poses naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been portrayed numerous times previously and make it so fresh, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be happening immediately before the spectator.
Yet there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred city's eye were anything but devout. That may be the very earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his red lips in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but known through images, the master portrayed a renowned female courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for purchase.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the artist was not the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His early paintings do offer explicit erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to another early creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes calmly at you as he begins to undo the black sash of his robe.
A few annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with prestigious church projects? This profane pagan deity resurrects the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, uneasy way. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been deceased for about 40 years when this account was recorded.
