Who was the dark-feathered god of love? What secrets that masterpiece uncovers about the rogue genius
A youthful boy screams while his head is forcefully gripped, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural account. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a single turn. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his remaining hand, ready to cut Isaac's throat. A certain aspect stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary acting ability. There exists not just fear, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but also deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
The artist adopted a well-known scriptural story and made it so fresh and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in front of you
Viewing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a real face, an accurate record of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled hair and almost dark pupils – features in two other works by Caravaggio. In each case, that highly expressive face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's alleys, his black feathery wings demonic, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often painful desire, is shown as a very real, brightly illuminated nude form, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a musical score, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except here, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love depicted blind," penned the Bard, just prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares straight at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a metropolis ignited by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed many occasions before and render it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately before the spectator.
However there was another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the holy city's attention were anything but holy. What could be the very earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A young man opens his crimson mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for sale.
How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic historians improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His early paintings do offer explicit sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might look to another initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.
A several years following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly established with important church commissions? This unholy non-Christian god revives the erotic challenges of his initial works but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter'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 youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was recorded.