What exactly was the dark-feathered deity of desire? What secrets that masterwork uncovers about the rebellious genius
The youthful boy cries out while his skull is forcefully gripped, a large thumb pressing into his face as his parent's powerful palm holds him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented youth from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary twist. However the father's preferred method involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his remaining hand, ready to cut Isaac's neck. A certain element remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not just fear, shock and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
He took a well-known biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in view of you
Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a real face, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost dark eyes – features in two other paintings by Caravaggio. In every case, that richly expressive face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black feathery wings demonic, a naked adolescent running chaos in a affluent residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly lit unclothed form, standing over toppled-over items that include stringed instruments, a musical score, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except here, the melancholic disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just before this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master painted his multiple images of the same unusual-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted many occasions previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring directly in front of you.
Yet there was another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's eye were everything but devout. That may be the absolute earliest hangs in London's art museum. A youth opens his red mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in early modern painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through photographs, the master represented a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.
How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art scholars unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His early works indeed make explicit sexual implications, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might look to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he starts to untie the black sash of his garment.
A several annums after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost respectable with prestigious church projects? This profane pagan deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his early works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The artist had been dead for about forty annums when this account was documented.