What was Caravaggio's dark-feathered god of desire? What insights this masterwork uncovers about the rebellious artist
A young lad cries out as his head is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his parent's powerful palm holds him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his remaining hand, prepared to cut the boy's throat. A certain element remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary acting skill. Within exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed gaze but also deep grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.
He adopted a familiar biblical story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen right in view of you
Viewing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a real face, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled hair and almost dark pupils – appears in several other works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly emotional face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on the city's streets, his dark feathery appendages sinister, a naked child creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a London museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a very tangible, brightly lit nude form, straddling overturned items that include stringed devices, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an architect's T-square. This pile of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – save here, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Cupid painted blind," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master created his three images of the identical distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a city ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted numerous occasions before and render it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening directly before the spectator.
Yet there was another side to the artist, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, just talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the holy city's eye were anything but devout. That may be the very first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the murky waters of the glass vase.
The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral signifiers is clear: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His early works do make explicit sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, observers might look to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he starts to undo the black sash of his robe.
A several years following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost established with prestigious church commissions? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A English traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.
The artist had been dead for about 40 years when this account was recorded.
