What exactly was Caravaggio's dark-feathered deity of love? What secrets that masterwork uncovers about the rogue genius
The youthful lad cries out while his head is firmly held, a large digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the neck. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical account. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by God to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic steel knife he grips in his other hand, ready to slit the boy's throat. A certain element stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable expressive skill. There exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.
He took a well-known biblical story and transformed it so fresh and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold right in view of the viewer
Viewing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled hair and nearly black pupils – features in two additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his black plumed appendages sinister, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a very real, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a musical score, plate armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Love depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, looking with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the same distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a city ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical story that had been depicted numerous times before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be happening directly before the spectator.
However there existed another side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's attention were anything but devout. That may be the absolute first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A young man opens his red mouth 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: observers can discern the painter's dismal room mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass container.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a famous woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for sale.
What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the artist was not the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His early works do offer overt sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at you as he starts to undo the black ribbon of his robe.
A several years following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian deity revives the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a more powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A British traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 annums when this story was recorded.
