Who exactly was Caravaggio's black-winged deity of love? The secrets that masterpiece uncovers about the rebellious artist
The young lad screams as his skull is firmly gripped, a large digit digging into his cheek as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural account. It seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a single turn. However the father's preferred method involves the metallic grey knife he grips in his other palm, prepared to slit the boy's throat. A certain aspect remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary acting skill. There exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his darkened eyes but also profound grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.
He took a well-known biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to happen right in front of you
Standing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a young model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost dark pupils – appears in several other paintings by the master. In every instance, that highly emotional visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his black plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed child running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a very real, vividly lit unclothed form, straddling overturned items that include stringed instruments, a musical score, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love painted blind," penned the Bard, just before this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a city ignited by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many times before and make it so new, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring directly in front of you.
However there existed another aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial twenties with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, just talent and boldness. The majority of the works with which he caught the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but holy. That may be the absolute first resides in London's art museum. A young man opens his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room reflected in the murky liquid of the glass vase.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was not the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as some artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.
His initial paintings do offer explicit sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, identified with the city's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, observers might look to an additional early creation, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine gazes calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.
A few annums after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing almost established with important church commissions? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been deceased for about 40 years when this account was documented.
