What was Caravaggio's dark-feathered deity of love? What secrets this masterpiece uncovers about the rebellious artist
The youthful lad cries out as his head is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb digging into his face as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the biblical account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. However the father's chosen method involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his remaining hand, ready to slit the boy's throat. A certain element remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary acting skill. There exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
The artist took a well-known biblical story and made it so fresh and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold right in front of you
Viewing before the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real face, an accurate record of a young subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost dark pupils – appears in two other paintings by Caravaggio. In each case, that highly emotional visage commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his black plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed child running riot in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly lit unclothed form, straddling overturned items that comprise stringed instruments, a music manuscript, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Love painted sightless," wrote the Bard, just prior to this work was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen confidence as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master painted his multiple images of the identical distinctive-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred artist in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately before you.
However there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's eye were everything but devout. That could be the very first hangs in London's art museum. A young man opens his red lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.
The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master represented a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his interpreters since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on film in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some art historians unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His early paintings do make explicit erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young creator, aligned with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might look to another early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black sash of his robe.
A several years after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan god resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about forty annums when this story was documented.
