What exactly was the dark-feathered deity of desire? The insights that masterwork reveals about the rogue genius
The young boy screams as his skull is forcefully gripped, a large digit pressing into his face as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the throat. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering child from the biblical account. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a single twist. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his other hand, prepared to slit Isaac's throat. One definite element stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed extraordinary expressive skill. Within exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally deep grief that a protector could abandon him so completely.
He took a familiar scriptural story and made it so fresh and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in view of the viewer
Viewing before the painting, viewers identify this as a actual face, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost dark pupils – features in two other works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly emotional visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's alleys, his dark plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed child running chaos in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a very tangible, vividly illuminated nude figure, straddling toppled-over objects that include stringed devices, a music score, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created 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 renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could adopt a biblical story that had been depicted many times previously and render it so new, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring directly before you.
However there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, evident 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, just talent and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were everything but holy. What may be the very first resides in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.
The adolescent wears a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a famous female prostitute, holding a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.
What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators ever since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His early paintings do make explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to an additional initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.
A several years following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly established with important ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan god revives the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British visitor saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty annums when this story was recorded.