What was Caravaggio's dark-feathered deity of desire? The secrets that masterwork reveals about the rebellious genius
The youthful boy screams as his head is firmly gripped, a large digit pressing into his cheek as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a single twist. Yet the father's chosen method involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his other hand, prepared to slit Isaac's throat. A definite element remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally profound grief that a protector could betray him so utterly.
He took a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in front of the viewer
Standing before the painting, observers recognize this as a real face, an precise depiction of a young model, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost dark pupils – features in two other works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly emotional face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his dark plumed appendages demonic, a naked child creating riot in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated nude form, standing over toppled-over items that include musical devices, a musical score, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except here, the gloomy mess is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Love sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at you. That face – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master created his three portrayals of the same distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a city enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been portrayed many times before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be happening immediately before you.
Yet there was another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred metropolis's eye were anything but holy. What could be the very first hangs in London's National Gallery. A young man opens his red lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the murky waters of the transparent container.
The boy wears a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.
What are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain art scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.
His initial paintings do offer overt erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful artist, identified with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to another initial work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his garment.
A several annums after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan deity revives the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a more intense, uneasy way. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about forty annums when this account was documented.
