Who was the dark-feathered god of love? What insights this masterwork uncovers about the rogue genius
A youthful boy screams as his head is firmly held, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the tormented youth from the scriptural narrative. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a single turn. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic steel knife he grips in his remaining palm, ready to slit the boy's neck. A definite aspect stands out – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but also deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so utterly.
He adopted a familiar biblical story and transformed it so fresh and raw that its horrors seemed to happen directly in view of the viewer
Viewing before the artwork, observers identify this as a real face, an accurate record of a adolescent subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly black pupils – appears in two additional works by the master. In every case, that highly emotional visage commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery appendages sinister, a naked child running riot in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely real, brightly lit unclothed form, straddling toppled-over objects that include stringed devices, a music manuscript, metal armor and an architect's ruler. This pile of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – save here, the melancholic mess is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love painted blind," penned Shakespeare, just prior to this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the same unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred painter in a city ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous times before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.
Yet there was a different side to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, just talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but devout. What may be the absolute first resides in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his red lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent container.
The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through images, the master portrayed a famous female prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.
What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a question that has split his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some art scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.
His initial paintings indeed offer explicit erotic implications, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, identified with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to another initial work, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he starts to undo the black ribbon of his garment.
A few years after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This profane pagan god resurrects the sexual provocations of his early works but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English visitor saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty years when this account was documented.
