What exactly was Caravaggio's black-winged god of love? The insights this masterwork reveals about the rogue artist
A youthful lad screams while his head is forcefully gripped, a large digit pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful palm holds him by the neck. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could break his neck with a solitary twist. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the metallic steel knife he grips in his remaining hand, ready to slit Isaac's throat. A certain element stands out – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable acting ability. Within exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
He took a familiar scriptural tale and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen directly in front of you
Viewing before the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly black pupils – appears in two additional works by the master. In each case, that highly emotional face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the darkness while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his dark plumed wings sinister, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very tangible, brightly illuminated nude figure, standing over overturned objects that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht DĂ¼rer's print Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just before this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the same unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a city ignited by religious revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn churches: he could take a biblical story that had been portrayed many occasions before and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening directly in front of the spectator.
However there existed a different aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred city's eye were everything but holy. What could be the very earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his red lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent container.
The adolescent sports a pink flower in his hair – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through images, the master represented a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated past reality is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain art scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.
His early paintings do offer explicit erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might look to an additional early creation, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at you as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.
A several years following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing almost established with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian deity revives the erotic challenges of his early paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy 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.
