Who was Caravaggio's black-winged deity of desire? The insights this masterwork uncovers about the rogue genius
A young lad screams as his head is firmly held, a massive digit digging into his face as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering youth from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a single turn. However Abraham's chosen method involves the metallic grey knife he grips in his remaining palm, ready to cut Isaac's neck. A definite aspect stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary acting skill. There exists not just fear, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
He took a well-known biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold right in front of you
Viewing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a real face, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost dark eyes – appears in two additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly emotional visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness acquired on the city's streets, his black feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed child running chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly illuminated nude form, straddling toppled-over items that include stringed instruments, a musical score, plate armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic mess is created by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," penned the Bard, just prior to this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three images of the same unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a city ignited by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been portrayed numerous times before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring directly in front of you.
However there existed a different side to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded 1592, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, only talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred city's attention were everything but holy. What may be the absolute first resides in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his red lips in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass container.
The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through images, the master portrayed a famous woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for purchase.
How are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex past reality is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some art scholars unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His initial paintings do make overt erotic suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might look to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black sash of his garment.
A few annums after the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with important church commissions? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 years when this story was recorded.
