Who exactly was the black-winged god of desire? The insights that masterwork uncovers about the rogue genius
A youthful boy cries out while his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural account. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his other hand, ready to cut Isaac's throat. One certain element stands out – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable expressive skill. Within exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but also profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
The artist took a well-known scriptural story and made it so fresh and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in front of the viewer
Viewing before the painting, observers identify this as a real countenance, an accurate record of a young subject, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost black eyes – appears in two additional works by the master. In each case, that richly expressive face commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed child running riot in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly illuminated unclothed figure, standing over overturned objects that comprise musical devices, a music manuscript, metal armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with bold confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master created his three images of the same distinctive-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted many times previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring directly in front of you.
However there existed a different aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred city's attention were everything but devout. What may be the very earliest hangs in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his red lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent container.
The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through images, the master portrayed a famous woman prostitute, holding a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.
His early paintings indeed make overt erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, observers might look to another initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at you as he begins to undo the dark sash of his garment.
A several years after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan god revives the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a more powerful, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.
The artist had been dead for about forty years when this story was documented.
