Who was Caravaggio's black-winged god of love? What insights that masterwork uncovers about the rogue artist
A young lad screams as his head is firmly held, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his father's mighty hand holds him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a single twist. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to slit Isaac's throat. One certain aspect remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not just dread, shock and begging in his darkened eyes but also deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.
The artist adopted a familiar scriptural story and transformed it so fresh and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold right in front of you
Standing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly dark pupils – appears in two additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly emotional visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness acquired on the city's streets, his black feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated nude form, straddling overturned items that comprise musical instruments, a music manuscript, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the gloomy mess is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love painted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly before this work was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been portrayed many occasions before and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be happening directly in front of the spectator.
Yet there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the city, just talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's eye were everything but devout. That may be the very earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his red mouth in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.
The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding flowers and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through images, the master portrayed a famous female courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the artist was not the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.
His initial works do offer explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at you as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.
A few years following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with prestigious church projects? This profane pagan god revives the erotic provocations of his early works but in a increasingly intense, uneasy manner. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 annums when this account was recorded.
