What exactly was the black-winged god of desire? The secrets that masterpiece uncovers about the rogue artist
A young boy cries out as his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the biblical account. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his other palm, prepared to cut the boy's throat. A certain element stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. There exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but also deep sorrow that a protector could betray him so completely.
The artist took a well-known biblical story and transformed it so fresh and raw that its horrors appeared to happen directly in view of the viewer
Viewing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise record of a young model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and almost dark pupils – features in two additional paintings by the master. In every instance, that highly expressive face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his dark plumed wings demonic, a unclothed child creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel totally unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, vividly lit nude figure, standing over toppled-over objects that include musical devices, a music score, plate armour and an architect's T-square. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – save here, the gloomy mess is created by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been depicted many occasions previously and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately before the spectator.
However there existed a different aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only skill and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's eye were everything but devout. That may be the very earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his crimson lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.
The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, the master portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for sale.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated past reality is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His early paintings indeed offer explicit sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with the city's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to an additional initial work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares coolly at you as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his robe.
A several years after the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming almost respectable with important ecclesiastical projects? This unholy pagan god revives the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a more intense, unsettling way. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British visitor viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about 40 years when this account was documented.
