Who was Caravaggio's black-winged deity of love? What insights that masterwork reveals about the rogue artist
A youthful boy screams as his skull is firmly held, a large thumb pressing into his face as his father's powerful palm holds him by the throat. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a single twist. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his other hand, prepared to cut the boy's neck. One certain aspect remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. There exists not just fear, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but also deep grief that a protector could abandon him so completely.
The artist adopted a familiar biblical story and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold right in front of the viewer
Standing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a real face, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled locks and nearly black pupils – features in two other paintings by the master. In every case, that richly expressive visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his black plumed appendages sinister, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with often painful longing, is shown as a extremely real, brightly lit nude figure, standing over overturned items that include musical devices, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of items echoes, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy mess is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Cupid depicted blind," penned the Bard, just prior to this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master created his multiple images of the identical unusual-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a city ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted many occasions before and make it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately before you.
Yet there existed a different aspect to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, just talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's attention were anything but holy. What could be the very earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent container.
The adolescent sports a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female courtesan, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain art scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.
His early paintings do offer explicit sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black ribbon of his garment.
A several years following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost established with prestigious church commissions? This profane pagan god revives the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British visitor saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.
The artist had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was documented.