What was the dark-feathered deity of desire? The secrets this masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
A youthful boy screams as his head is forcefully held, a massive thumb digging into his face as his parent's mighty palm grasps him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a single twist. However the father's chosen approach involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his other hand, ready to slit Isaac's neck. A definite element remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive skill. Within exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed gaze but also profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
He adopted a well-known scriptural story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold right in front of you
Standing before the painting, observers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost dark eyes – appears in two additional works by the master. In every case, that highly emotional visage commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness acquired on the city's alleys, his black feathery wings sinister, a naked adolescent running riot in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is portrayed as a very real, brightly lit unclothed form, standing over toppled-over items that include musical instruments, a music manuscript, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Cupid depicted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the same distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many occasions before and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening immediately before you.
Yet there was another aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, just skill and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the holy city's eye were everything but holy. That may be the very earliest hangs in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his red lips in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see the painter's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.
The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but known through images, Caravaggio represented a famous female courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was not the homosexual icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His initial works indeed make overt sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, aligned with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black ribbon of his garment.
A several years after Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly established with important church commissions? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his early works but in a more powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A British visitor saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about forty years when this account was documented.
