What was Caravaggio's dark-feathered god of love? What insights that masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
A youthful lad cries out as his head is firmly held, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his father's powerful palm holds him by the throat. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented youth from the biblical account. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could break his neck with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen method involves the silvery grey blade he holds in his other palm, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. One definite element stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary acting skill. Within exists not only dread, shock and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.
The artist took a well-known biblical tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in front of the viewer
Viewing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost black pupils – features in several additional works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly emotional face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's streets, his black feathery wings sinister, a naked child creating riot in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often painful desire, is shown as a very tangible, vividly illuminated nude form, straddling toppled-over objects that include stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love painted blind," wrote the Bard, just before this work was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master created his three images of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed religious painter in a metropolis ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many occasions previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror appeared to be happening directly before the spectator.
However there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, just skill and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's attention were anything but holy. What could be the absolute first hangs in London'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 poverty: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.
The adolescent sports a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern art. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned female prostitute, clutching a posy to her chest. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His initial paintings indeed make overt sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young creator, aligned with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to an additional early work, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares coolly at you as he starts to undo the black ribbon of his robe.
A several annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming almost respectable with important ecclesiastical projects? This unholy pagan deity revives the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.
The artist had been dead for about 40 years when this story was recorded.
