What exactly was the dark-feathered deity of desire? The insights that masterwork reveals about the rogue artist
A youthful lad cries out as his skull is forcefully held, a large thumb digging into his face as his father's mighty hand holds him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the biblical account. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary turn. However the father's chosen method involves the metallic steel blade he grips in his remaining hand, ready to cut the boy's neck. A certain element remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece demonstrated remarkable acting skill. Within exists not just fear, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but also profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
The artist adopted a familiar biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen right in view of you
Viewing before the painting, viewers identify this as a real face, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the same youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost black eyes – features in several additional works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly emotional visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark plumed wings sinister, a naked child creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with frequently painful desire, is portrayed as a very tangible, brightly illuminated nude figure, straddling toppled-over items that comprise musical devices, a music manuscript, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the melancholic mess is created by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just before this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three images of the same distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a city ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous times previously and render it so fresh, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be happening directly in front of the spectator.
However there was a different side to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, only talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred city's attention were everything but holy. What could be the very first resides in London's art museum. A young man parts his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the murky liquid of the glass container.
The adolescent wears a pink blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio represented a famous female courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for purchase.
How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as some artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.
His early paintings do offer explicit sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young creator, aligned with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to another initial work, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to undo the dark sash of his robe.
A several years after the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with prestigious church commissions? This unholy pagan god revives the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British visitor saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about forty annums when this story was recorded.