Who was the dark-feathered god of love? The secrets that masterpiece reveals about the rebellious artist
The youthful boy screams as his head is firmly gripped, a large thumb pressing into his face as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the biblical account. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a solitary turn. However Abraham's chosen method involves the metallic grey knife he grips in his remaining palm, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. A certain element remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable acting ability. There exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed gaze but also profound grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.
The artist took a familiar biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to happen right in view of the viewer
Standing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical boy – identifiable by his tousled locks and nearly dark eyes – features in two other works by the master. In each case, that highly expressive visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his dark plumed wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London museum, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often painful longing, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly lit nude form, standing over overturned objects that comprise musical devices, a music manuscript, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save here, the melancholic disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold confidence as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing youth in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted many times before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring directly in front of you.
However there was a different aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, just skill and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were everything but holy. That may be the very earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his red lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.
The adolescent wears a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern art. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but known through photographs, the master represented a famous woman prostitute, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His early works indeed make overt erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young creator, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares coolly at you as he starts to untie the black sash of his garment.
A few annums after the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly established with important church projects? This unholy pagan god resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about forty annums when this story was recorded.
