What exactly was the black-winged god of desire? The secrets that masterpiece reveals about the rogue genius
The young lad screams as his head is firmly gripped, a massive thumb digging into his face as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the biblical account. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a single twist. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his remaining hand, ready to cut the boy's throat. One definite aspect stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece demonstrated remarkable acting skill. Within exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but also profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
The artist took a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold right in front of you
Standing before the artwork, observers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost black pupils – features in two other works by the master. In every instance, that richly expressive visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black plumed wings demonic, a unclothed child creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly illuminated nude form, standing over overturned items that comprise musical instruments, a musical score, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Love painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions before and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring directly before the spectator.
However there existed another aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he came in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, only talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the holy city's attention were anything but devout. That may be the very earliest hangs in London's art museum. A youth parts his crimson lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's dismal room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.
The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for sale.
What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.
His early works do make explicit erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young creator, identified with the city's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes calmly at the spectator as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his garment.
A several annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian god revives the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The artist had been dead for about forty years when this account was documented.
