Who was the dark-feathered god of love? What secrets that masterwork uncovers about the rogue artist
The young boy cries out as his head is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical account. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his neck with a single turn. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic grey knife he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to slit the boy's neck. One certain aspect stands out – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable acting skill. There exists not just fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep grief that a protector could abandon him so completely.
He adopted a well-known scriptural story and made it so fresh and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in view of the viewer
Standing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an precise record of a young subject, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and nearly black eyes – features in several other works by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly expressive visage commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his black feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a London museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful longing, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly lit unclothed form, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy mess is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Cupid depicted blind," penned the Bard, shortly before this work was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious painter in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed many times before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening immediately before the spectator.
Yet there existed another side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, only talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's eye were anything but devout. That could be the absolute earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his red lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent container.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for sale.
What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators ever since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic historians improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His early paintings indeed offer overt sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful artist, identified with the city's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to an additional initial work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares coolly at you as he starts to undo the dark sash of his garment.
A several annums after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This profane pagan god revives the erotic challenges of his early paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling way. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about forty annums when this story was documented.