What was the dark-feathered deity of desire? What insights that masterwork uncovers about the rebellious artist
A youthful boy cries out as his skull is forcefully held, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand holds him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his neck with a single twist. However the father's chosen method involves the metallic grey blade he holds in his remaining palm, ready to cut the boy's throat. One certain element remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed remarkable acting ability. Within exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed eyes but additionally deep grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.
He took a familiar scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to happen directly in front of you
Standing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a adolescent subject, because the same youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly dark eyes – features in two additional paintings by the master. In each case, that highly expressive face dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on the city's streets, his dark feathery wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a affluent residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently painful longing, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly lit unclothed form, standing over toppled-over items that comprise stringed devices, a musical score, metal armour and an architect's ruler. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and construction equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save here, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love depicted blind," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the identical unusual-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions before and make it so new, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.
However there existed a different aspect to the artist, evident as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial twenties with no teacher or patron in the urban center, just talent and boldness. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy city's attention were everything but devout. That may be the absolute first resides in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.
The boy sports a pink blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but known through images, the master represented a famous female prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was not the homosexual icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain art scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His initial works do make explicit sexual implications, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young creator, identified with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black sash of his garment.
A few years following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last becoming almost established with important church commissions? This unholy non-Christian deity revives the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about 40 years when this account was recorded.
