What was the black-winged god of love? What insights that masterpiece uncovers about the rogue genius
A youthful boy cries out while his head is firmly gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his parent's mighty hand holds him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the biblical account. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his son, could break his neck with a solitary twist. However the father's chosen approach involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. One definite element stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not only fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but also profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
The artist took a well-known scriptural tale and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in front of the viewer
Standing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise record of a young model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost black pupils – features in several other works by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly emotional visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed child creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an architect's ruler. This heap of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except here, the gloomy mess is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly before this work was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master created his multiple images of the same distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted many times before and render it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.
However there was another side to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, just talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred city's eye were anything but devout. What may be the very first resides in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his red mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.
The boy wears a pink blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through photographs, the master portrayed a famous female courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.
His early works do make overt erotic suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might look to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark sash of his garment.
A few years following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost established with important church commissions? This profane non-Christian god revives the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.
The painter had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was documented.
