Who was the black-winged god of love? The insights that masterwork reveals about the rogue artist
The youthful boy screams as his head is forcefully held, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the neck. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his remaining hand, ready to cut the boy's neck. A definite aspect stands out – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable expressive ability. There exists not only fear, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also deep grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.
He took a familiar scriptural story and made it so fresh and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in front of you
Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost black eyes – features in several additional works by the master. In every case, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a affluent residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful longing, is portrayed as a very real, brightly lit nude form, standing over toppled-over items that comprise musical devices, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of items resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic mess is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master painted his three images of the same distinctive-looking kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous times before and render it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring directly in front of you.
However there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only skill and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's attention were everything but holy. What may be the absolute first hangs in London's art museum. A youth parts his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see the painter's gloomy room mirrored in the murky waters of the glass vase.
The boy wears a pink blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern painting. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through photographs, the master represented a famous woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.
How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex past reality is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some artistic scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.
His early paintings indeed make explicit erotic suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black ribbon of his robe.
A few annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with important church projects? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was recorded.
