Who was the black-winged god of desire? What insights that masterwork reveals about the rogue genius
A young lad cries out while his head is forcefully held, a large digit digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical account. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his son, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. Yet the father's preferred method involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his other hand, ready to cut Isaac's throat. One certain aspect remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not just dread, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but additionally deep grief that a protector could betray him so utterly.
He adopted a familiar scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in view of you
Standing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a young model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost black eyes – features in two additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly emotional visage commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his black feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed child running chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly lit nude form, straddling toppled-over items that comprise stringed devices, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an architect's ruler. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted sightless," penned the Bard, just before this work was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes straight at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he poses naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three portrayals of the identical unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous times before and render it so new, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring directly before you.
Yet there existed a different aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were anything but devout. That could be the absolute first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson 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: observers can discern the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass container.
The boy wears a pink blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.
How are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past reality is that the painter was not the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His initial works do offer overt erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young creator, aligned with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the dark sash of his robe.
A few years after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the erotic challenges of his early works but in a more intense, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about forty years when this account was recorded.
