Who exactly was Caravaggio's black-winged god of desire? The secrets this masterwork reveals about the rogue artist
The young boy cries out while his skull is firmly held, a large digit digging into his cheek as his father's powerful hand holds him by the throat. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural account. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. Yet Abraham's chosen method involves the metallic grey knife he grips in his other hand, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. One definite aspect remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. There exists not only dread, shock and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
He adopted a familiar biblical story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold right in view of the viewer
Standing before the painting, observers identify this as a actual face, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the same youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost black eyes – features in several other works by Caravaggio. In each case, that richly emotional visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his dark plumed wings demonic, a naked child creating riot in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated nude form, standing over toppled-over items that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the floor in the German master's print Melancholy – except here, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind," penned Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He gazes directly at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed numerous occasions before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be happening directly in front of you.
However there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, just talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred city's attention were anything but holy. That could be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his red lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the murky waters of the transparent vase.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through photographs, the master represented a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for sale.
How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex past reality is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some art historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.
His early paintings indeed offer overt erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might look to another initial work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.
A several years after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the erotic provocations of his early works but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A English visitor viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 annums when this account was documented.
