What was the black-winged god of desire? What secrets that masterpiece reveals about the rebellious artist
A young lad screams while his head is firmly gripped, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his father's powerful palm holds him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the biblical account. It seems as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. Yet the father's preferred method involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his remaining palm, prepared to cut the boy's throat. A certain aspect remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary acting skill. Within exists not just fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
He took a familiar scriptural story and made it so fresh and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen directly in view of you
Viewing before the artwork, observers identify this as a real face, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost black pupils – features in two other paintings by the master. In every case, that richly emotional visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black plumed wings sinister, a naked adolescent running chaos in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often painful longing, is shown as a very real, vividly illuminated nude form, standing over toppled-over items that include musical instruments, a musical score, metal armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic disorder is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the same unusual-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a city ignited by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous occasions before and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately before the spectator.
However there existed another side to the artist, evident as quickly as he came in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, just talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's attention were anything but devout. That may be the absolute first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal room reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass container.
The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans holding flowers and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a famous female prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.
What are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was not the homosexual hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some art scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His early works indeed offer overt sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with the city's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes calmly at you as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.
A several annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming nearly established with prestigious church projects? This profane non-Christian deity revives the sexual provocations of his early works but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about forty annums when this account was recorded.
