Who exactly was the black-winged deity of love? The secrets that masterwork uncovers about the rogue genius
The young boy cries out as his skull is forcefully gripped, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single twist. However the father's preferred method involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his other hand, ready to slit Isaac's throat. One certain element stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable expressive skill. Within exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally profound grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.
The artist took a familiar scriptural tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen right in view of you
Viewing before the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost black eyes – features in several other works by the master. In every case, that highly emotional face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his black feathery wings demonic, a unclothed child creating chaos in a affluent residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a very real, brightly lit unclothed form, straddling overturned items that comprise stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except here, the gloomy mess is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can release.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted blind," penned the Bard, just before this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares straight at you. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with bold confidence as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master created his multiple images of the identical distinctive-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted many times before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.
However there existed a different side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, only skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the sacred city's attention were everything but devout. What could be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent container.
The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female prostitute, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.
How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art scholars unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His initial paintings do offer explicit erotic suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young creator, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to another early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the black sash of his garment.
A several years after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with important church projects? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling way. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.
The artist had been dead for about forty years when this account was recorded.
