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What exactly was Caravaggio's dark-feathered god of love? What secrets that masterwork uncovers about the rogue genius
A young lad screams while his skull is firmly gripped, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. However Abraham's chosen method involves the metallic grey knife he holds in his remaining hand, prepared to cut the boy's throat. One definite element remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable acting skill. There exists not just fear, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but also deep sorrow that a protector could betray him so completely.
He adopted a well-known scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold right in view of you
Standing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly black eyes – features in two other works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly expressive visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed child creating riot in a affluent residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful longing, is portrayed as a very tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling overturned objects that comprise stringed instruments, a music manuscript, metal armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except here, the melancholic disorder is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Love sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love depicted blind," penned Shakespeare, just prior to this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master created his three images of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a city enflamed by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed many occasions before and render it so fresh, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring directly before the spectator.
However there was another side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, just talent and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the sacred city's attention were everything but devout. That could be the absolute first resides in London's art museum. A young man opens his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the murky waters of the transparent container.
The boy wears a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but known through images, the master represented a famous woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as some artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.
His initial works do offer overt sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his robe.
A several annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, uneasy manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty years when this account was recorded.
Brian Hernandez
A passionate writer and shopping enthusiast with a keen eye for quality products and lifestyle trends.
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