Who was Caravaggio's black-winged deity of desire? The insights that masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
A youthful lad screams while his skull is forcefully gripped, a large thumb pressing into his face as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. However Abraham's preferred method involves the silvery grey blade he grips in his other palm, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. One certain element remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not just fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
The artist adopted a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold right in front of you
Standing before the painting, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an precise record of a young model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly dark eyes – appears in several additional paintings by the master. In each case, that highly expressive face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on the city's streets, his black feathery wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often painful desire, is shown as a very real, vividly illuminated unclothed form, straddling overturned objects that include stringed devices, a music manuscript, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melancholy – except here, the melancholic disorder is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Love depicted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares straight at you. That face – ironic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he poses naked – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the same unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted many occasions before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be happening immediately before the spectator.
However there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only talent and boldness. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were anything but holy. What may be the absolute first resides in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his red mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass container.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex commerce in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through images, the master portrayed a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is clear: intimacy for sale.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.
His initial paintings do make explicit sexual implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to another early creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his garment.
A few years after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with important church projects? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty annums when this story was recorded.