Who exactly was the black-winged deity of love? The secrets that masterwork uncovers about the rogue artist
A young boy cries out as his skull is forcefully held, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical account. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his son, could break his neck with a solitary twist. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery grey blade he holds in his remaining hand, ready to cut the boy's neck. One definite aspect remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed remarkable acting ability. Within exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
He adopted a familiar biblical story and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to happen right in front of the viewer
Standing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a real face, an precise depiction of a young model, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost black pupils – appears in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every case, that richly expressive visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark plumed wings demonic, a unclothed child running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very real, brightly illuminated unclothed form, standing over overturned objects that comprise stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear strewn across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love depicted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That face – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master painted his multiple images of the same unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions before and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening directly before the spectator.
However there existed another side to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, only talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's attention were everything but devout. What could be the absolute first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A young man opens his red lips in a yell of agony: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the murky liquid of the glass container.
The boy wears a pink blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through photographs, the master represented a renowned woman prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the painter was not the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His early paintings indeed make explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to an additional early work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at you as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his robe.
A few annums after Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with important church projects? This unholy non-Christian god revives the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.
The painter had been deceased for about 40 years when this account was recorded.
