Who exactly was Caravaggio's black-winged god of desire? What insights that masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
The youthful boy screams while his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb digging into his face as his parent's mighty hand holds him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical account. The painting seems as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a single twist. However Abraham's chosen method involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his remaining hand, prepared to slit Isaac's throat. One certain element stands out – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not just fear, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but also profound sorrow that a protector could betray him so utterly.
He took a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to happen right in view of the viewer
Standing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a young subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost black pupils – appears in two other works by the master. In every case, that highly expressive face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness acquired on the city's streets, his black feathery wings demonic, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly lit nude figure, straddling overturned objects that comprise stringed instruments, a musical score, metal armor and an architect's T-square. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Cupid painted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly prior to this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master created his three images of the same distinctive-looking youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed numerous times previously and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be happening immediately in front of the spectator.
However there was a different side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, just skill and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but devout. That could be the absolute first hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic commerce in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous woman courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the artist was not the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some art historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.
His initial works indeed make overt sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, observers might look to another initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.
A few years following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with prestigious church commissions? This profane non-Christian god revives the erotic challenges of his early paintings but in a increasingly intense, uneasy manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was recorded.
