What was the dark-feathered god of love? The insights this masterwork uncovers about the rogue artist
A youthful boy cries out while his head is firmly held, a massive digit pressing into his face as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a single turn. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the metallic grey knife he holds in his other hand, ready to cut Isaac's neck. One certain element stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable expressive skill. Within exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
He took a well-known biblical story and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold right in front of you
Standing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate record of a young model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his tousled hair and almost black pupils – features in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly expressive face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his black plumed wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly illuminated unclothed form, straddling overturned objects that comprise stringed devices, a music score, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love depicted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three images of the same unusual-looking kid in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a metropolis ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be happening directly before the spectator.
Yet there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he came in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but holy. That may be the absolute first resides in the UK's art museum. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.
The boy wears a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through photographs, the master represented a renowned female prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: intimacy for sale.
What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the artist was not the queer hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His initial paintings do offer explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.
A several annums after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly established with prestigious church projects? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his early works but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century 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 Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 annums when this story was documented.
