Who exactly was the dark-feathered god of desire? The insights this masterwork uncovers about the rebellious artist
A youthful boy cries out as his head is forcefully held, a massive digit pressing into his face as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the neck. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. However Abraham's chosen method involves the silvery grey blade he grips in his remaining palm, ready to slit Isaac's neck. A certain element remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed extraordinary acting ability. There exists not only dread, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
He adopted a well-known scriptural tale and transformed it so fresh and raw that its horrors seemed to happen right in view of you
Viewing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and nearly dark pupils – appears in several additional works by the master. In each instance, that richly expressive face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his black plumed appendages sinister, a naked adolescent running riot in a affluent residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a London gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a very tangible, brightly lit nude form, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise musical devices, a musical score, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except in this case, the melancholic disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the identical unusual-looking kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by religious revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted many times before and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror appeared to be happening directly before the spectator.
However there existed a different aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, just talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred city's eye were everything but holy. What may be the very earliest hangs in London's art museum. A young man opens his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.
The adolescent wears a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans holding blooms and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio represented a renowned female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.
How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art scholars unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His initial paintings indeed make explicit erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at you as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his robe.
A few years after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with important church projects? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the erotic challenges of his early paintings but in a more intense, uneasy manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about forty annums when this account was documented.
