What was Caravaggio's black-winged god of love? The secrets that masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist
The young boy screams as his head is forcefully gripped, a massive digit pressing into his face as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. However Abraham's chosen method involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his other hand, ready to slit Isaac's neck. One certain aspect remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary acting skill. There exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but also deep grief that a protector could betray him so utterly.
He adopted a familiar scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen right in view of you
Standing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a real face, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark pupils – features in two additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly expressive visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness learned on the city's alleys, his black feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed child running riot in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a very tangible, brightly lit nude figure, standing over overturned objects that comprise musical devices, a musical score, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save in this case, the melancholic disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.
"Love sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid painted sightless," wrote the Bard, just prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he poses naked – is the identical one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred artist in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted numerous occasions before and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring directly before the spectator.
However there existed another side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the city, only talent and boldness. The majority of the works with which he caught the sacred city's eye were everything but holy. What may be the very first resides in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can see the painter's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent container.
The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern art. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, holding a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for sale.
What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His initial works do offer overt sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might look to another early creation, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he begins to untie the dark sash of his robe.
A several years following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly established with important church projects? This profane pagan deity revives the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 years when this account was recorded.
