Who was Caravaggio's black-winged deity of desire? The insights that masterwork uncovers about the rogue artist
The young lad screams while his skull is firmly held, a massive digit digging into his face as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical account. It seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic grey knife he holds in his other hand, ready to cut the boy's neck. One certain aspect stands out – whomever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary acting skill. There exists not only fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.
He took a familiar scriptural tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its terrors appeared to happen right in front of the viewer
Standing before the artwork, observers identify this as a real face, an precise record of a young subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled hair and nearly black pupils – features in two additional works by Caravaggio. In every case, that richly emotional visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his dark plumed wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a London gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely real, vividly lit nude figure, standing over overturned items that comprise musical instruments, a music score, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of items echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the ground in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares straight at you. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master created his three images of the same unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed many occasions previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately before you.
However there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but holy. That could be the very earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass container.
The adolescent sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through images, the master portrayed a renowned female prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for purchase.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic historians improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.
His early works indeed make overt erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to another initial creation, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the black sash of his garment.
A few years following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a more powerful, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 annums when this story was documented.