What exactly was the black-winged god of love? What insights that masterpiece uncovers about the rebellious genius
A young boy screams while his skull is firmly gripped, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. Yet Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his remaining hand, ready to slit the boy's neck. One definite element remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed remarkable acting skill. Within exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but also deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so utterly.
The artist adopted a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to happen right in view of the viewer
Viewing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost black pupils – appears in several other paintings by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly emotional visage commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his black feathery wings sinister, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed form, standing over toppled-over items that comprise musical instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic mess is created by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Love sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, just prior to this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the same unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed sacred artist in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous times previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror appeared to be happening directly in front of the spectator.
Yet there existed another side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred city's attention were everything but holy. What could be the very first resides in London's art museum. A youth opens his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room reflected in the murky waters of the transparent container.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in early modern painting. Venetian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but documented through photographs, Caravaggio represented a renowned woman courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for sale.
How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic historians improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His early paintings indeed offer explicit erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to an additional early work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his garment.
A few years after the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his early works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about forty annums when this story was documented.