What exactly was the black-winged deity of love? What insights this masterwork uncovers about the rogue artist
A young boy cries out while his head is firmly held, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his father's powerful palm holds him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the biblical account. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. Yet Abraham's chosen method involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his remaining hand, prepared to slit Isaac's throat. One definite element stands out – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not just dread, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but also profound grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.
He adopted a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen directly in front of the viewer
Viewing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a actual face, an precise record of a young subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled hair and almost black pupils – appears in several additional works by the master. In each case, that richly expressive face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a London museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often painful longing, is shown as a very tangible, brightly lit unclothed form, standing over overturned objects that comprise musical devices, a music score, metal armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love painted blind," penned Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares straight at you. That face – ironic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted many times previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of you.
Yet there was a different side to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, only talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the holy city's attention were anything but holy. What could be the very first hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his red lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's dismal room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio represented a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for sale.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.
His early paintings indeed offer overt sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to another initial creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to undo the dark sash of his robe.
A few years after the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing almost respectable with important church commissions? This profane pagan deity revives the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A British visitor viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The artist had been deceased for about 40 years when this account was recorded.
