What exactly was the dark-feathered god of desire? The secrets that masterpiece uncovers about the rogue artist
A youthful boy screams as his head is forcefully gripped, a large digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the tormented youth from the biblical narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary turn. However the father's preferred method involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his remaining palm, ready to cut Isaac's throat. A certain element remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.
The artist adopted a well-known biblical story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold right in front of the viewer
Viewing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an precise record of a young model, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost black eyes – features in two additional works by the master. In each instance, that highly emotional visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his black plumed wings demonic, a naked child creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is portrayed as a very real, vividly lit unclothed figure, straddling overturned objects that include musical devices, a music manuscript, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of items echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Love depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just before this work was created around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master painted his three images of the identical distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring directly before the spectator.
However there was a different side to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the holy city's eye were anything but devout. What could be the absolute first hangs in London's art museum. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the murky waters of the transparent container.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, the master portrayed 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 make of the artist's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was not the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some art historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His early paintings do offer overt sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young creator, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his garment.
A several years after the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling way. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A English traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about forty years when this story was recorded.
