Who exactly was the black-winged deity of desire? The secrets this masterpiece uncovers about the rogue artist
A youthful boy cries out while his head is forcefully held, a massive digit pressing into his face as his parent's powerful palm holds him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single turn. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his remaining hand, ready to cut Isaac's throat. One definite element remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not only dread, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally profound grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.
The artist adopted a well-known scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold directly in view of the viewer
Standing before the painting, observers recognize this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a young model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark pupils – features in several additional paintings by the master. In every case, that richly emotional visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his dark plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a London gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often painful longing, is shown as a very real, brightly lit nude form, straddling toppled-over items that include stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – save here, the melancholic mess is created by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, shortly before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three images of the same distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions before and render it so fresh, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be happening directly in front of you.
However there was another aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the sacred city's attention were anything but devout. What could be the absolute earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his red mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.
The boy wears a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but known through images, Caravaggio represented a famous woman prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for purchase.
What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His initial paintings indeed offer explicit sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, observers might look to an additional early work, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of wine gazes calmly at you as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.
A several years after Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art collector the nobleman, when he was at last becoming almost established with prestigious church projects? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A English visitor viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about 40 annums when this story was documented.
