What was the black-winged god of love? What insights this masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
A young boy cries out while his skull is forcefully gripped, a large thumb digging into his face as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented youth from the biblical account. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a single twist. Yet the father's preferred method involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his other palm, ready to slit the boy's throat. A definite aspect stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not only dread, shock and begging in his darkened eyes but also deep grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.
The artist took a familiar biblical story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its terrors appeared to happen directly in view of the viewer
Standing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost black pupils – appears in several additional works by the master. In each instance, that highly emotional visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his black feathery wings demonic, a naked adolescent running chaos in a affluent residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Viewers feel totally unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a very real, brightly lit nude figure, standing over toppled-over items that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic mess is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love painted blind," penned Shakespeare, just before this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the same distinctive-looking kid in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring directly in front of you.
However there was another aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, only skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but devout. That may be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his red lips in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can see the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent container.
The boy sports a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female prostitute, holding a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for sale.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was not the homosexual icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some artistic historians improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.
His initial paintings do make overt erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at you as he starts to undo the black sash of his garment.
A few years following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan god resurrects the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A English visitor saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was documented.
