What was the black-winged god of love? What insights this masterwork uncovers about the rebellious artist
A young lad screams while his head is forcefully gripped, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the silvery steel knife he holds in his other hand, prepared to cut the boy's throat. One definite aspect stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable acting skill. There exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but additionally profound grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.
He adopted a familiar scriptural tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen directly in front of you
Standing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real face, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly black pupils – appears in several additional works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly expressive face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed child running riot in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a very real, brightly lit unclothed figure, standing over overturned items that include stringed devices, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This pile of items echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love painted blind," penned Shakespeare, just before this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three images of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated religious painter in a metropolis ignited by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous times before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring directly before the spectator.
However there existed a different aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, just talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were anything but holy. That could be the absolute first resides in London's art museum. A youth parts his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.
The adolescent sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through images, the master portrayed a renowned female courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for purchase.
What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the artist was not the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain art scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His early works indeed offer explicit erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the dark sash of his garment.
A few years after the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly established with prestigious church projects? This profane pagan god resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty years when this account was documented.
