Who was Caravaggio's dark-feathered deity of desire? What secrets that masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
The young boy screams while his head is forcefully held, a massive thumb digging into his face as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic steel blade he grips in his other hand, ready to slit the boy's neck. One definite element remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not only fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
The artist adopted a familiar biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and raw that its terrors seemed to happen directly in front of you
Standing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a actual face, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark pupils – appears in several additional works by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly emotional face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his dark plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a very real, brightly lit nude form, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise stringed instruments, a music score, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the same distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many times before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of you.
However there existed a different side to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his early twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, only talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were anything but devout. That may be the absolute earliest resides in London's art museum. A young man opens his red mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.
The adolescent sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through images, the master portrayed a renowned woman courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for sale.
How are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex historical reality is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.
His initial paintings do offer explicit erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young creator, identified with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to another initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to undo the black sash of his garment.
A several annums after 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 established with important church projects? This profane pagan god resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.
The artist had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was documented.
