What exactly was the dark-feathered god of desire? What secrets that masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist
A youthful boy screams as his skull is firmly gripped, a large thumb pressing into his face as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering child from the biblical account. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. However the father's preferred approach involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his remaining hand, prepared to cut the boy's neck. A definite aspect stands out – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable expressive skill. Within exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but also deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
He adopted a familiar biblical story and transformed it so fresh and raw that its terrors seemed to happen right in front of the viewer
Standing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly black pupils – features in two additional works by the master. In each case, that richly emotional visage commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his black plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed child running chaos in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely real, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, standing over overturned objects that comprise stringed devices, a music score, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This pile of possessions echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic mess is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the same distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a city enflamed by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been portrayed numerous occasions before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the terror seemed to be happening immediately in front of the spectator.
However there was another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, only skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the holy city's eye were anything but devout. That could be the very earliest hangs in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's gloomy room reflected in the murky waters of the transparent vase.
The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio represented a famous woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the artist was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art scholars unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His early works indeed offer explicit erotic implications, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to an additional early work, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at you as he starts to undo the dark sash of his garment.
A few years after the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly established with important ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.
The painter had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was documented.
