What was Caravaggio's dark-feathered deity of desire? What insights this masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist
The young boy cries out while his head is firmly held, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful palm holds him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the biblical account. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery steel knife he holds in his other hand, ready to cut the boy's throat. A definite element remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary acting skill. Within exists not only dread, shock and begging in his darkened gaze but also profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
The artist adopted a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to happen directly in front of the viewer
Standing in front of the painting, observers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a young subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost dark pupils – appears in several additional paintings by the master. In each case, that highly emotional face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery wings demonic, a naked child running chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a London museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a very real, brightly lit unclothed form, standing over toppled-over objects that include stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural gear strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy mess is created by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares directly at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master painted his multiple images of the same distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous times previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening directly before you.
Yet there existed another aspect to the artist, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, only skill and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were anything but holy. What could be the absolute earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.
The boy wears a pink blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.
How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic historians improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.
His initial paintings do make explicit sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, aligned with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to an additional early work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black sash of his robe.
A few years following Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming almost established with prestigious church projects? This profane non-Christian god revives the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A British traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about forty annums when this story was recorded.
