Who was Caravaggio's black-winged deity of desire? What secrets that masterwork reveals about the rebellious genius
The youthful boy screams as his head is forcefully held, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a single twist. Yet the father's preferred method involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his remaining palm, ready to slit Isaac's throat. A definite element stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not just fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but also deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
He took a familiar scriptural story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in view of the viewer
Standing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an precise record of a young model, because the same youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and almost black eyes – features in two other works by the master. In every case, that richly expressive face dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black feathery appendages sinister, a naked adolescent running chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly lit nude figure, straddling overturned items that include stringed instruments, a musical score, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural gear strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic mess is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master created his three images of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a city enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening immediately in front of the spectator.
However there was a different side to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the city, only skill and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were anything but holy. That may be the absolute first hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his red mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the murky waters of the glass container.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned female courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art scholars unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.
His early works indeed offer overt sexual suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to another early creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at you as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.
A several annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly established with important ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The artist had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was recorded.
