Who was Caravaggio's dark-feathered deity of desire? What secrets that masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
The young lad screams while his head is forcefully held, a large thumb pressing into his face as his parent's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. Yet Abraham's chosen method involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his remaining hand, ready to slit Isaac's neck. A definite element remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary acting skill. There exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but also deep sorrow that a protector could betray him so completely.
He took a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to happen right in front of you
Viewing before the painting, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a young subject, because the same youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and almost dark pupils – appears in two other works by the master. In every instance, that highly expressive face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness acquired on the city's streets, his dark plumed appendages demonic, a naked child running chaos in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a very tangible, brightly illuminated nude form, straddling overturned objects that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Love sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love painted sightless," penned the Bard, just before this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the same unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many occasions previously and render it so fresh, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be happening immediately in front of the spectator.
Yet there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early twenties with no teacher or patron in the city, just skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were everything but devout. What may be the absolute first resides in London's art museum. A youth parts his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.
The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio represented a renowned female prostitute, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for sale.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art scholars unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His initial paintings do make overt erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark sash of his robe.
A few annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector the nobleman, when he was at last becoming almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about forty years when this account was documented.
