What exactly was the black-winged deity of love? What secrets this masterwork reveals about the rogue artist
The young boy cries out while his head is firmly gripped, a massive digit digging into his face as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a single turn. Yet the father's chosen method involves the metallic grey knife he holds in his other palm, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. One certain element stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable expressive skill. There exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but also deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
He took a familiar scriptural story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its terrors appeared to happen directly in front of the viewer
Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost black eyes – features in two other works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly emotional face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed child running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly lit nude form, standing over toppled-over items that comprise musical devices, a music manuscript, plate armour and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy mess is created by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this work was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master painted his multiple images of the same distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted numerous times before and render it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately before the spectator.
Yet there existed a different side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial twenties with no mentor or patron in the city, only talent and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's eye were everything but holy. What may be the absolute earliest hangs in London's art museum. A youth parts his red mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the glass vase.
The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His initial paintings indeed offer overt erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, observers might look to another early work, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at you as he begins to undo the dark sash of his garment.
A few years following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing almost established with important church projects? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, uneasy way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty years when this account was recorded.