Who exactly was the black-winged deity of desire? The secrets that masterpiece reveals about the rebellious artist
The young lad cries out as his skull is firmly held, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his father's powerful hand holds him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his other palm, ready to slit Isaac's throat. One certain aspect remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not just fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
The artist adopted a well-known biblical story and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in front of you
Standing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a real face, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly black pupils – features in several other paintings by Caravaggio. In each case, that richly emotional visage commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his dark feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely real, vividly lit nude form, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Love sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold confidence as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the same unusual-appearing youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious painter in a city enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions before and render it so fresh, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.
Yet there existed a different aspect to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial twenties with no teacher or patron in the city, only skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the holy city's attention were everything but holy. That may be the very first resides in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the murky waters of the transparent container.
The boy sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern art. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through images, the master represented a famous woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.
What are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated past reality is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain art historians unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His initial paintings indeed offer overt erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, viewers might turn to another early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark sash of his garment.
A several years after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost established with important church commissions? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the sexual provocations of his early works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was recorded.
