Who was the black-winged deity of desire? What insights that masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist
The youthful lad cries out as his head is forcefully gripped, a large thumb digging into his face as his parent's powerful palm holds him by the throat. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural account. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his son, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the metallic steel blade he grips in his other hand, ready to slit the boy's throat. A definite element remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated remarkable acting ability. There exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
The artist took a familiar scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold directly in front of you
Viewing before the artwork, observers identify this as a actual face, an precise record of a young model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost black eyes – features in two other works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly expressive face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on the city's streets, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often painful desire, is shown as a extremely real, brightly lit unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over items that include stringed devices, a music score, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Love depicted blind," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he poses naked – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the same distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a city ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many times previously and render it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring directly in front of you.
Yet there was a different aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, just talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred city's attention were everything but devout. What may be the very first resides in London's art museum. A youth opens his red mouth in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass container.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a famous woman courtesan, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the artist was not the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some artistic historians improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His initial paintings indeed offer overt sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at you as he begins to untie the black sash of his robe.
A several years following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly established with prestigious church commissions? This unholy pagan god revives the erotic challenges of his initial works but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A English visitor saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 annums when this account was recorded.
