What was the black-winged god of desire? What insights this masterwork reveals about the rogue artist
A young boy screams as his skull is forcefully gripped, a large digit digging into his face as his father's powerful hand holds him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could break his neck with a solitary twist. Yet Abraham's chosen method involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his remaining hand, ready to cut the boy's throat. One definite element stands out – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary acting ability. There exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also deep grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
He adopted a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in front of the viewer
Standing before the painting, viewers identify this as a real face, an accurate record of a young subject, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost dark eyes – features in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly expressive face commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the darkness while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his dark feathery wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is portrayed as a very real, vividly lit unclothed form, straddling toppled-over items that include stringed devices, a music manuscript, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – save in this case, the melancholic mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love depicted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the same unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many times before and make it so fresh, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be happening immediately in front of the spectator.
Yet there existed another side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, just talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred metropolis's eye were anything but holy. That could be the very first resides in London's art museum. A young man parts his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass container.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans holding blooms and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated historical reality is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on film in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.
His early works do offer explicit erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to another initial creation, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares coolly at you as he starts to undo the black sash of his garment.
A several annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy non-Christian deity revives the erotic challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was recorded.
