Who was the dark-feathered god of desire? What insights this masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
The young boy cries out while his skull is firmly held, a massive thumb digging into his face as his father's mighty hand holds him by the neck. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a solitary twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his remaining palm, ready to slit the boy's neck. A definite element remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally profound grief that a protector could betray him so completely.
He took a well-known biblical story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in view of you
Viewing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost black eyes – features in several other works by the master. In each instance, that highly expressive visage 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 acquired on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery wings sinister, a unclothed child creating riot in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often painful longing, is shown as a very real, brightly illuminated nude form, straddling toppled-over items that comprise stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen confidence as he poses naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the same unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a city enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous occasions before and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be happening directly before you.
Yet there was another side to the artist, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, only talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred city's eye were anything but holy. What could be the very first hangs in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his red lips in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's dismal room mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent container.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned woman courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for sale.
How are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators ever since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as some art historians improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.
His initial works do offer explicit erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to an additional early creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at you as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.
A few annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane pagan god revives the sexual challenges of his early works but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty years when this story was recorded.
