What exactly was the black-winged deity of love? The insights that masterpiece uncovers about the rebellious artist
The youthful lad cries out as his skull is firmly held, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the silvery steel knife he holds in his other palm, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. A certain aspect stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed remarkable acting skill. Within exists not only fear, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also deep grief that a protector could betray him so completely.
He adopted a well-known scriptural story and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold right in front of you
Viewing in front of the painting, observers identify this as a real face, an precise record of a young subject, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost black eyes – appears in several other paintings by the master. In each case, that highly expressive visage commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his dark feathery wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a very real, vividly lit nude figure, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a music score, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except here, the melancholic mess is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love depicted blind," penned the Bard, just prior to this work was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-looking kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been portrayed numerous times previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring directly in front of you.
Yet there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, just talent and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy city's attention were anything but devout. That may be the absolute first resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his red mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans holding flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous woman prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for purchase.
What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic historians improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His initial paintings do offer overt erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to another early creation, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.
A several annums following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A English traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about 40 annums when this story was documented.
