Who was the dark-feathered deity of love? What secrets that masterpiece reveals about the rebellious artist
A young lad screams while his head is forcefully held, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand holds him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary twist. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his other hand, ready to cut Isaac's neck. A definite aspect stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed remarkable expressive ability. There exists not only fear, surprise and pleading in his shadowed eyes but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
The artist adopted a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in view of you
Viewing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a real face, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the same youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark pupils – features in several other paintings by the master. In each case, that highly expressive face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black plumed wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a very real, vividly illuminated unclothed form, straddling overturned objects that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, metal armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted blind," wrote the Bard, just prior to this work was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares straight at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the same distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a city enflamed by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring directly before you.
However there existed another side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, just skill and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were everything but holy. What could be the absolute earliest hangs in London's art museum. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass container.
The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in early modern art. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio represented a famous woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for purchase.
What are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some artistic historians improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.
His initial paintings indeed make overt erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares calmly at you as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his garment.
A few years following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost respectable with important church projects? This unholy non-Christian god revives 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 representation of the painter's lover. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty years when this story was documented.
