What exactly was the black-winged god of desire? The secrets that masterwork uncovers about the rebellious artist
A young boy screams while his skull is firmly gripped, a large thumb pressing into his face as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the biblical account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to kill his son, could snap his neck with a single turn. Yet the father's chosen method involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his remaining palm, ready to slit the boy's neck. One definite aspect stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
He took a familiar scriptural tale and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen directly in view of you
Standing before the painting, observers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the same youth – recognizable by his disheveled hair and almost black eyes – features in several other paintings by Caravaggio. In each case, that richly emotional face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his black feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a affluent residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often painful desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated nude figure, standing over toppled-over items that include stringed devices, a music score, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master created his three images of the identical distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a city enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions before and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately before the spectator.
Yet there was a different aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the sacred city's eye were anything but devout. What could be the very earliest hangs in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson lips in a scream of pain: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for sale.
How are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His early paintings do offer overt erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might look to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares calmly at you as he starts to undo the black sash of his robe.
A few annums after Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian deity revives the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A British visitor saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about 40 years when this story was documented.
