Who exactly was Caravaggio's dark-feathered deity of desire? The insights that masterpiece reveals about the rebellious artist
The youthful lad cries out while his head is firmly held, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical account. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a single twist. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his remaining hand, ready to cut Isaac's throat. A definite aspect stands out – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable acting ability. Within exists not just dread, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally deep grief that a protector could abandon him so completely.
The artist took a well-known scriptural story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to unfold right in view of the viewer
Standing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a young subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled locks and nearly black pupils – appears in several additional works by the master. In each instance, that highly emotional face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed child running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly illuminated nude form, straddling toppled-over items that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save in this case, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just before this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master created his three portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a city enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous occasions before and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.
However there was a different aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, just talent and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy city's attention were everything but holy. That could be the very earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A young man opens his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: observers can see the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.
The boy sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, Caravaggio represented a famous female courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is clear: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.
His early paintings indeed offer explicit erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark sash of his garment.
A several annums after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost respectable with important church commissions? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, uneasy way. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 years when this account was recorded.
