Who was the dark-feathered deity of love? The secrets that masterwork uncovers about the rogue genius
A youthful lad screams as his head is forcefully gripped, a large thumb pressing into his face as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet Abraham's chosen method involves the silvery grey blade he grips in his remaining hand, ready to cut the boy's neck. One definite aspect remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally deep grief that a protector could abandon him so completely.
He adopted a well-known scriptural tale and made it so fresh and raw that its horrors seemed to happen directly in front of you
Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled hair and almost black pupils – appears in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each case, that highly emotional visage commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his dark plumed wings sinister, a naked adolescent creating riot in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly lit nude form, straddling toppled-over items that comprise stringed devices, a musical score, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just before this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master created his three portrayals of the same unusual-looking kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a city ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been portrayed many occasions previously and render it so new, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring directly before the spectator.
Yet there existed a different side to the artist, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were everything but devout. That may be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his red mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent container.
The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but known through images, the master portrayed a famous female prostitute, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for sale.
What are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His early paintings do offer explicit erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional initial work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares calmly at you as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his garment.
A several years following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost respectable with important church projects? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about forty years when this account was recorded.
