Who was the black-winged god of love? What insights that masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist
The youthful boy cries out as his skull is forcefully gripped, a large digit pressing into his cheek as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the biblical narrative. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. However the father's preferred method involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his remaining palm, ready to cut the boy's neck. A certain aspect stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not just fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed gaze but also profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
He adopted a well-known scriptural tale and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen right in front of the viewer
Standing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a young model, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and nearly dark pupils – appears in two additional works by the master. In each instance, that highly expressive visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark feathery wings demonic, a naked adolescent creating riot in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly lit nude form, standing over toppled-over items that comprise musical devices, a music score, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the ground in the German master's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy mess is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted blind," penned the Bard, just before this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen confidence as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the same unusual-looking kid in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed sacred painter in a city enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many times previously and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening immediately before the spectator.
Yet there existed a different side to the artist, evident as quickly as he came in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, just talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's eye were anything but holy. What could be the absolute first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A young man opens his crimson lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the glass container.
The boy sports a pink blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio represented a famous woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for sale.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.
His initial paintings indeed make explicit erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine gazes calmly at you as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his garment.
A few years following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost established with prestigious church commissions? This profane pagan deity resurrects the erotic challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty years when this story was recorded.
