Who was Caravaggio's dark-feathered god of desire? What insights this masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
The youthful boy screams as his head is firmly held, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical account. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a single twist. Yet Abraham's chosen method involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his other hand, prepared to cut the boy's throat. A certain aspect remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
The artist took a well-known biblical tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen directly in view of the viewer
Standing before the painting, observers identify this as a actual face, an accurate record of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost dark pupils – features in two other works by the master. In each case, that highly expressive visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his black plumed wings sinister, a unclothed child creating chaos in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a very real, brightly lit unclothed figure, straddling overturned objects that comprise musical devices, a music manuscript, plate armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Love sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this work was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three images of the identical distinctive-looking kid in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a metropolis ignited by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many times previously and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be happening directly before the spectator.
Yet there was another side to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the sacred metropolis's eye were anything but devout. What could be the absolute first hangs in London's art museum. A youth opens his red lips in a scream of pain: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.
The boy wears a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio represented a famous woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for purchase.
What are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His early paintings do make overt erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might look to an additional early creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at you as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.
A several annums following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing almost established with important church projects? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The artist had been dead for about 40 years when this account was recorded.