What was Caravaggio's black-winged deity of love? What insights that masterpiece reveals about the rebellious genius
The young boy cries out while his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand holds him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the biblical account. It seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. However the father's chosen approach involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his remaining palm, ready to slit Isaac's throat. A certain element remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary acting skill. Within exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but also profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.
The artist adopted a familiar biblical tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in front of you
Standing in front of the artwork, observers recognize this as a real face, an precise record of a young model, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost black pupils – features in several other works by Caravaggio. In each case, that richly expressive visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his black feathery wings demonic, a unclothed child running riot in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated nude form, standing over toppled-over items that comprise stringed devices, a musical score, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – save here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Love sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind," wrote the Bard, just before this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He gazes directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen confidence as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master created his multiple images of the same distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed sacred painter in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous times previously and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.
However there existed a different aspect to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, only skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the holy city's attention were everything but devout. What could be the very earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass container.
The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for sale.
What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.
His initial works do offer explicit erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol gazes calmly at the spectator as he begins to undo the black sash of his garment.
A few annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan deity revives the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A English traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.
The painter had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was recorded.
