What was Caravaggio's dark-feathered deity of love? What secrets this masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist
The young lad cries out as his skull is forcefully gripped, a large digit digging into his cheek as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the throat. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a single twist. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his other palm, prepared to slit Isaac's throat. A definite element remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable acting ability. There exists not just dread, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but also deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
He adopted a familiar scriptural tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold right in front of you
Viewing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a real countenance, an precise record of a young model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost black eyes – appears in two other works by Caravaggio. In each case, that richly emotional face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his dark feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed child running riot in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often painful desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, vividly lit nude figure, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the floor in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic disorder is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love painted sightless," wrote the Bard, shortly prior to this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with bold assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted numerous times previously and make it so fresh, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.
Yet there was a different side to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were everything but devout. That could be the absolute earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass container.
The adolescent sports a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern art. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for purchase.
What are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the artist was not the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic scholars unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.
His early works do offer overt sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young artist, aligned with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might look to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at you as he starts to undo the dark sash of his robe.
A few annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly established with important church commissions? This profane non-Christian deity revives the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a more intense, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about 40 annums when this account was documented.
