What was Caravaggio's black-winged deity of desire? The insights that masterwork uncovers about the rogue artist
The young boy screams while his skull is firmly held, a massive digit digging into his face as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a single turn. However Abraham's chosen method involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his other palm, ready to cut the boy's neck. A certain element stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable acting skill. There exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also profound sorrow that a protector could betray him so utterly.
The artist took a well-known scriptural story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen directly in front of the viewer
Viewing before the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost dark eyes – features in two other works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly emotional visage commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his black feathery wings sinister, a unclothed child running chaos in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over items that comprise stringed devices, a music score, metal armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save in this case, the melancholic disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.
"Love sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted blind," penned the Bard, just before this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a metropolis ignited by religious revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted numerous times before and render it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening immediately in front of the spectator.
Yet there was another aspect to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were anything but holy. What may be the absolute earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his red lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass container.
The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated past reality is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.
His initial works indeed offer overt erotic implications, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to an additional initial work, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at you as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his robe.
A several years after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost established with important church projects? This profane non-Christian god revives the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about 40 years when this account was recorded.