Who was the black-winged deity of desire? The insights that masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
The young boy screams as his skull is firmly held, a large digit pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful palm holds him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural account. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a single turn. However Abraham's chosen method involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his other palm, ready to cut Isaac's throat. A certain aspect stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary acting skill. Within exists not only fear, shock and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally profound grief that a protector could abandon him so completely.
He adopted a familiar scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold right in front of the viewer
Viewing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled locks and nearly black pupils – features in several additional paintings by the master. In every instance, that highly emotional face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on the city's streets, his black plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed child creating riot in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a extremely real, vividly lit unclothed figure, standing over overturned objects that comprise musical instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love depicted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this work was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That face – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the same distinctive-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a city ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed many occasions previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be happening immediately before the spectator.
However there was another aspect to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only skill and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were anything but holy. That may be the very earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the murky liquid of the glass container.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work lost in the second world war but known through images, the master represented a famous female courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex historical reality is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.
His initial paintings do offer overt sexual implications, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, observers might look to another early work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his robe.
A few annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with prestigious church projects? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about forty years when this account was documented.