Who was the black-winged god of desire? What insights that masterpiece reveals about the rebellious genius
A young lad screams while his skull is forcefully gripped, a large digit pressing into his face as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented youth from the scriptural narrative. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen method involves the silvery grey blade he grips in his other palm, ready to cut the boy's neck. A definite aspect remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable acting ability. Within exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.
He adopted a familiar scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to happen right in front of you
Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a real face, an precise depiction of a adolescent subject, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost dark eyes – features in several other works by the master. In every instance, that highly expressive visage commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his black feathery wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed form, standing over overturned items that include musical instruments, a musical score, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the melancholic disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid painted blind," penned the Bard, just prior to this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three portrayals of the same distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a city ignited by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been depicted numerous occasions previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.
However there existed another side to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, just talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but holy. What may be the very first hangs in London's art museum. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the glass vase.
The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through images, the master represented a famous woman courtesan, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for sale.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.
His initial paintings do offer overt erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young creator, aligned with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might look to an additional early work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.
A few annums after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming almost respectable with prestigious church projects? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was documented.
