Who was the black-winged deity of desire? The insights that masterpiece uncovers about the rogue artist
A youthful boy screams as his head is firmly gripped, a massive digit pressing into his face as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the silvery steel knife he holds in his other palm, ready to cut the boy's neck. One definite element stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not just dread, shock and pleading in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
The artist took a well-known biblical tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen right in front of you
Standing in front of the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the same youth – recognizable by his tousled hair and nearly dark eyes – features in several additional works by the master. In every instance, that richly expressive visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black plumed appendages sinister, a naked child creating riot in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a very tangible, brightly lit unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an architect's T-square. This pile of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Cupid depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, just prior to this work was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he poses naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the same unusual-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed many times before and make it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring directly before the spectator.
Yet there existed another aspect to the artist, evident as quickly as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were anything but holy. That could be the absolute first resides in London's art museum. A young man opens his red lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's dismal room mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent container.
The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master represented a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for sale.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the artist was not the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic historians improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His initial paintings indeed make explicit erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black sash of his robe.
A few years following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost established with prestigious church commissions? This profane non-Christian god revives the sexual provocations of his early works but in a more intense, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was documented.
