Who exactly was the black-winged god of desire? What insights that masterpiece uncovers about the rebellious artist
A youthful boy cries out while his head is firmly gripped, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented youth from the scriptural narrative. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could snap his spinal column with a single twist. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his remaining palm, prepared to cut the boy's throat. One definite element stands out – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable acting skill. There exists not just dread, shock and begging in his darkened gaze but also deep grief that a protector could betray him so completely.
He took a familiar biblical story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen right in view of the viewer
Standing before the painting, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a young subject, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost black eyes – features in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each case, that richly expressive visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black plumed wings demonic, a naked child running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often painful longing, is shown as a very real, brightly lit unclothed form, standing over overturned items that comprise musical instruments, a musical score, plate armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of items resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Cupid depicted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly before this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He gazes straight at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold confidence as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three portrayals of the identical unusual-looking kid in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed numerous times previously and make it so fresh, so raw and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring directly before you.
However there was another aspect to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, just talent and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy city's eye were everything but holy. What could be the very earliest resides in London's art museum. A youth opens his red mouth in a yell of agony: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but known through photographs, the master portrayed a famous woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for sale.
How are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic historians improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His initial works do offer explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his robe.
A several annums after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian god revives the erotic challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: 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 name of this adolescent was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty annums when this story was documented.
