Who exactly was Caravaggio's black-winged deity of desire? The insights that masterwork reveals about the rogue genius
A youthful boy cries out as his head is firmly gripped, a large digit pressing into his face as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his remaining hand, ready to cut the boy's neck. One definite aspect remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but also deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so utterly.
He adopted a familiar biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in front of you
Viewing before the painting, viewers identify this as a actual face, an precise record of a young subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly black eyes – features in several additional paintings by the master. In each case, that highly expressive visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black feathery wings sinister, a unclothed child creating riot in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated unclothed form, straddling overturned items that comprise musical instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural gear strewn across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Cupid depicted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three images of the identical distinctive-looking kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a metropolis ignited by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted many times before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring directly before the spectator.
However there was a different side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he came 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 urban center, just talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's eye were anything but devout. What may be the very first hangs in London's art museum. A youth opens his red lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the murky waters of the glass container.
The boy sports a pink flower in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern art. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through images, the master represented a famous female prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of one boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on screen in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His early works do offer explicit sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, observers might look to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black sash of his garment.
A few annums after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian god revives the erotic challenges of his early paintings but in a more intense, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British visitor viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about forty annums when this story was documented.
