Who exactly was Caravaggio's dark-feathered deity of desire? The secrets that masterwork reveals about the rogue artist
The young lad cries out while his skull is forcefully held, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a single twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the metallic grey knife he holds in his remaining hand, ready to slit Isaac's throat. One definite element remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not just fear, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally profound grief that a protector could betray him so utterly.
The artist took a familiar biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in front of the viewer
Viewing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a adolescent subject, because the same youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost dark pupils – features in two additional paintings by the master. In each instance, that highly emotional face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his dark feathery appendages sinister, a naked child running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a very tangible, brightly illuminated nude form, standing over toppled-over items that include musical instruments, a musical score, plate armour and an architect's T-square. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except in this case, the melancholic mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid painted sightless," wrote the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares straight at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master created his multiple images of the same unusual-looking youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a city enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted many occasions previously and make it so new, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.
However there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, only skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were anything but holy. What could be the very earliest resides in London's art museum. A young man opens his red mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.
The boy sports a pink flower in his hair – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned woman prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one 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 homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.
His early works do offer explicit sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might look to an additional early creation, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark sash of his garment.
A few years following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost respectable with prestigious church commissions? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty years when this account was recorded.
