Who was the black-winged god of love? The secrets that masterpiece uncovers about the rebellious genius
The youthful boy screams as his head is forcefully gripped, a massive digit pressing into his face as his parent's mighty hand holds him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical account. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a single twist. However the father's chosen approach involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his remaining hand, ready to slit the boy's throat. A certain aspect stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable acting skill. There exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but also deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
He took a familiar biblical story and transformed it so fresh and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold right in front of the viewer
Viewing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an precise record of a young subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled hair and nearly dark pupils – features in two additional works by the master. In each instance, that highly emotional visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his black plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a well-to-do dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a very real, brightly lit nude form, straddling overturned objects that include stringed devices, a music score, metal armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly before this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with bold confidence as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master painted his three images of the same unusual-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many occasions previously and make it so fresh, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately before you.
Yet there existed another aspect to the artist, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the holy city's attention were anything but holy. That could be the absolute earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his red mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a famous female prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.
What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain art historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His initial paintings do offer explicit erotic implications, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to another initial creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at you as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his robe.
A few years after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last becoming almost established with important church projects? This unholy pagan deity revives the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A English visitor viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.
The artist had been dead for about forty annums when this story was recorded.
