What was the dark-feathered god of love? What insights that masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
A young boy cries out as his skull is forcefully gripped, a large thumb pressing into his face as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen method involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his remaining palm, ready to slit the boy's throat. A certain element stands out – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece demonstrated remarkable acting skill. There exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but additionally profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
The artist adopted a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to happen right in front of the viewer
Standing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost dark eyes – appears in two additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each case, that highly expressive face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a very real, vividly illuminated unclothed form, straddling toppled-over items that comprise musical instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an architect's ruler. This pile of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except here, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Love sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Cupid painted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares directly at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a city ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted numerous times before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring directly in front of you.
Yet there was another aspect to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial twenties with no teacher or patron in the city, just skill and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were everything but holy. That could be the very first resides in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his red mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned woman courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is clear: intimacy for sale.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of boys – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical reality is that the artist was not the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some art scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His initial works indeed offer explicit erotic suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.
A several years after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane pagan god resurrects the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a more intense, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about forty years when this account was documented.
