What was the dark-feathered deity of desire? What secrets this masterwork uncovers about the rebellious artist
The young boy screams while his skull is forcefully held, a large digit digging into his face as his parent's powerful palm holds him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the biblical account. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a single twist. However Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his other hand, ready to cut the boy's throat. One certain element stands out – whoever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable acting skill. There exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
The artist adopted a familiar biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold right in front of the viewer
Viewing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost black pupils – features in two additional paintings by the master. In each case, that richly expressive visage commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his black plumed wings sinister, a unclothed child running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often painful longing, is shown as a very real, vividly illuminated unclothed form, standing over overturned objects that comprise musical devices, a music manuscript, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – save here, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just before this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master created his three images of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to adorn churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions before and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of you.
Yet there was another aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, just talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were everything but holy. That could be the absolute earliest hangs in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see the painter's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the transparent container.
The boy sports a pink blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but known through images, the master portrayed a renowned woman courtesan, holding a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for sale.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated past reality is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art historians unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His early works indeed offer explicit erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his robe.
A several years following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly established with prestigious church projects? This unholy pagan god revives the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 annums when this account was documented.
