What was Caravaggio's black-winged god of desire? The insights this masterwork uncovers about the rebellious artist
The young boy screams as his head is firmly held, a large digit pressing into his face as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the throat. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the biblical account. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet the father's preferred method involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his other hand, prepared to cut the boy's neck. A definite aspect remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. There exists not only fear, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep grief that a protector could abandon him so completely.
The artist adopted a familiar biblical tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold right in front of the viewer
Standing in front of the artwork, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark pupils – features in two other paintings by the master. In each case, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his black plumed appendages demonic, a naked child running chaos in a affluent residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly illuminated unclothed form, standing over overturned items that include stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy mess is created by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Love painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master painted his three images of the same distinctive-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a metropolis ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions before and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring directly in front of you.
Yet there was a different side to the artist, evident as quickly as he came in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, just skill and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's eye were everything but holy. That could be the absolute first resides in London's art museum. A young man parts his red lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent vase.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio represented a famous woman courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.
How are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition 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 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.
His initial works indeed make overt erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young creator, identified with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to another initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares coolly at the spectator as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.
A few annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly established with important church projects? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the sexual provocations of his early works but in a more powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about forty years when this story was documented.
