Who exactly was the black-winged god of love? What secrets this masterwork reveals about the rogue artist
A youthful lad cries out as his head is firmly gripped, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the scriptural narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a single turn. However the father's preferred method involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his other hand, prepared to slit the boy's neck. A certain element stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary acting skill. There exists not only dread, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but also deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.
The artist adopted a familiar biblical story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen directly in front of the viewer
Viewing before the artwork, observers identify this as a actual face, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly black pupils – appears in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every case, that richly expressive visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark feathery appendages demonic, a naked adolescent creating riot in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely real, vividly illuminated nude form, straddling toppled-over objects that include musical devices, a music manuscript, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy mess is created by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can release.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love painted blind," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the same distinctive-looking youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been depicted many occasions previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be happening immediately in front of you.
Yet there existed a different side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, just talent and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's attention were anything but devout. That may be the very earliest hangs in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see the painter's gloomy room mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass container.
The adolescent wears a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio represented a famous woman courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for purchase.
What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical reality is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on film in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic historians improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His early works indeed offer explicit sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at you as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.
A several years after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly established with important church commissions? This profane non-Christian deity revives the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty years when this account was recorded.
