Who was the black-winged god of love? The secrets that masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist
The youthful boy cries out while his skull is forcefully held, a massive thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical account. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his remaining hand, ready to cut the boy's neck. A definite aspect stands out – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not just fear, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but also deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
The artist adopted a familiar biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold right in view of the viewer
Standing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly black eyes – features in several other works by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly emotional face commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his black feathery wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often painful longing, is shown as a very real, brightly illuminated unclothed form, straddling overturned objects that comprise musical instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an architect's ruler. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the melancholic disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted sightless," penned the Bard, just before this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the same unusual-looking kid in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many times previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.
Yet there was a different side to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, just skill and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the holy city's attention were everything but devout. That may be the very first resides in London's art museum. A young man opens his red mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.
The boy wears a pink blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned female prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for purchase.
What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some art scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.
His initial works indeed offer overt erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares calmly at you as he begins to untie the black sash of his robe.
A few annums following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 years when this story was documented.
