Who exactly was the dark-feathered god of love? What secrets this masterwork reveals about the rogue genius
The young boy cries out while his head is forcefully held, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful palm holds him by the neck. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single twist. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic grey knife he grips in his other palm, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. A definite aspect stands out – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
He adopted a well-known biblical tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold right in front of you
Viewing before the painting, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a young model, because the same youth – identifiable by his tousled locks and nearly dark eyes – appears in two additional works by the master. In each case, that highly emotional face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his black plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed child creating chaos in a affluent residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly illuminated unclothed form, straddling overturned items that comprise stringed devices, a music score, metal armour and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save here, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love painted blind," penned Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master created his three images of the identical distinctive-looking kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed sacred artist in a city enflamed by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted many occasions before and render it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately before the spectator.
However there existed a different aspect to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy city's eye were everything but holy. That may be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see the painter's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the transparent container.
The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, the master portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.
How are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.
His initial paintings indeed offer overt erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black sash of his robe.
A few annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with important church commissions? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a more intense, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about 40 years when this account was recorded.