Who was the dark-feathered deity of love? The insights that masterpiece reveals about the rogue genius
The young lad cries out while his head is forcefully gripped, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a single twist. However Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic grey knife he grips in his remaining hand, ready to slit the boy's throat. One certain element remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary acting skill. There exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but additionally profound grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
He took a well-known biblical story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in view of the viewer
Viewing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled locks and nearly dark eyes – appears in two additional paintings by the master. In every case, that richly expressive visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his dark plumed wings demonic, a naked child creating riot in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very real, vividly lit nude figure, standing over overturned items that include musical devices, a musical score, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the melancholic mess is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just before this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with bold confidence as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three images of the identical unusual-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been depicted numerous times before and make it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately before the spectator.
Yet there existed another side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, just skill and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but holy. That may be the absolute earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A young man opens his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's gloomy room reflected in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.
The adolescent sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, the master represented a famous female courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for purchase.
What are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.
His initial paintings indeed make explicit erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to another initial creation, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his robe.
A several annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly established with prestigious church commissions? This profane pagan deity revives the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.
The artist had been deceased for about 40 years when this story was documented.
