What was the dark-feathered deity of love? What insights this masterpiece uncovers about the rogue artist
The youthful lad screams while his skull is firmly gripped, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful hand holds him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the biblical account. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary twist. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his other palm, ready to slit the boy's neck. One certain element remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed remarkable expressive ability. There exists not just fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also profound grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
The artist took a well-known scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in front of the viewer
Viewing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a young model, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark eyes – features in two additional works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive face dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black plumed appendages sinister, a naked child creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated nude figure, standing over toppled-over items that comprise stringed devices, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – save here, the melancholic mess is created by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just prior to this work was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master painted his three images of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a city ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous times previously and render it so new, so raw and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.
However there existed a different side to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, only skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he caught the sacred metropolis's attention were everything but devout. That could be the absolute first resides in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the murky waters of the glass vase.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, the master portrayed a renowned woman courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain art scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His early works do offer overt erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might look to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at you as he starts to undo the black ribbon of his garment.
A several years following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy non-Christian deity revives the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 years when this story was recorded.
