Who exactly was the black-winged god of love? The secrets this masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
The young lad screams while his skull is forcefully held, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the scriptural narrative. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his son, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic grey blade he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to cut Isaac's throat. A definite element remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable expressive skill. Within exists not just fear, shock and begging in his darkened gaze but also deep grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.
The artist took a well-known biblical story and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to happen right in view of the viewer
Viewing before the artwork, observers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate record of a young model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost dark pupils – appears in two other paintings by the master. In every instance, that highly expressive visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his dark feathery appendages demonic, a naked adolescent running chaos in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated nude figure, straddling overturned items that include stringed instruments, a music manuscript, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love depicted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with bold assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master created his multiple images of the identical unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many occasions previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.
However there existed another side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, only skill and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were anything but holy. That may be the very first hangs in London's art museum. A young man opens his red mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the murky liquid of the transparent container.
The boy sports a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, Caravaggio represented a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for purchase.
What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His early works indeed offer explicit erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might look to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark sash of his robe.
A several annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with important church projects? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty years when this account was documented.
