What exactly was the black-winged deity of love? What secrets that masterwork reveals about the rogue genius
A young boy screams as his head is firmly held, a large digit digging into his face as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a single twist. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic grey knife he grips in his other hand, prepared to slit the boy's throat. One certain aspect stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.
He took a well-known biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to happen right in front of you
Standing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a actual face, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost black eyes – appears in two other paintings by the master. In each instance, that highly emotional visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his black plumed wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a very real, vividly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over objects that include musical devices, a musical score, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love depicted blind," penned the Bard, just before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master created his multiple images of the same distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a city ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions before and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be happening directly in front of the spectator.
Yet there existed another side to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were everything but holy. What could be the very earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber reflected in the murky liquid of the transparent container.
The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned woman prostitute, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for purchase.
What are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.
His initial paintings do offer explicit erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black sash of his robe.
A few annums after Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly established with important church projects? This unholy pagan god revives the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty annums when this story was recorded.
