What exactly was the dark-feathered god of love? What insights that masterwork uncovers about the rebellious artist
A young boy screams as his skull is forcefully gripped, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through the artist's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural account. It appears as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the metallic steel blade he grips in his other hand, prepared to slit the boy's throat. A definite aspect stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not only dread, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but also profound grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.
The artist adopted a familiar scriptural story and made it so fresh and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in view of the viewer
Standing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a real face, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark eyes – appears in several other works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly emotional visage commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on the city's streets, his dark plumed wings demonic, a naked child creating riot in a affluent residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often painful desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly lit nude form, standing over overturned objects that comprise musical instruments, a music score, metal armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted blind," penned Shakespeare, just before this work was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious painter in a city ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many occasions before and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be happening directly in front of the spectator.
Yet there was a different side to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, only skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred city's attention were anything but devout. That could be the absolute first hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth parts his red lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the murky liquid of the glass vase.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio represented a famous woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has divided his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some art scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.
His early works do offer overt erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark sash of his robe.
A several years after the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with prestigious church projects? This unholy pagan god revives the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 years when this story was documented.
