What exactly was the black-winged god of love? What insights this masterpiece uncovers about the rogue genius
A young boy screams while his head is firmly held, a massive thumb digging into his face as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical account. It appears as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his son, could break his neck with a solitary turn. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his other palm, ready to cut Isaac's throat. A definite element remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not just dread, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep grief that a protector could betray him so utterly.
He took a familiar biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold right in front of the viewer
Viewing before the painting, observers recognize this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the same youth – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost dark pupils – features in several additional works by the master. In every instance, that highly expressive face commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly lit nude figure, straddling toppled-over items that comprise stringed instruments, a music score, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic mess is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at you. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master created his three portrayals of the same distinctive-looking youth in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted many occasions before and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of you.
However there was a different aspect to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early twenties with no teacher or patron in the urban center, just skill and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but holy. What could be the very earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the murky liquid of the glass vase.
The boy sports a pink blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.
How are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some art historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His initial paintings indeed offer overt sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, observers might look to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black sash of his robe.
A few annums following Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian god revives the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a more intense, unsettling way. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been deceased for about 40 annums when this account was recorded.
