Who was Caravaggio's black-winged deity of love? What secrets that masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
The young boy screams as his head is forcefully gripped, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his son, could snap his spinal column with a solitary turn. However the father's chosen method involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his remaining palm, prepared to cut Isaac's throat. One certain element stands out – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated remarkable acting skill. There exists not only dread, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but also deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
He adopted a familiar scriptural story and transformed it so fresh and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold directly in front of you
Viewing before the artwork, observers identify this as a real face, an accurate record of a young model, because the same youth – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost dark eyes – appears in two other works by Caravaggio. In every case, that richly expressive visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black plumed wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a well-to-do dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly illuminated nude form, standing over overturned objects that comprise musical devices, a music manuscript, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Cupid painted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly before this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the same unusual-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a metropolis ignited by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many times before and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening directly before you.
Yet there existed a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial twenties with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were anything but devout. What may be the very first resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his red mouth in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's dismal room reflected in the murky waters of the transparent vase.
The adolescent sports a pink flower in his hair – a emblem of the erotic commerce in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through images, the master portrayed a renowned female courtesan, holding a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the painter was not the homosexual icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His early paintings do make overt erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, observers might look to another early creation, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares coolly at you as he begins to untie the dark sash of his garment.
A few years after the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy pagan god revives the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a more intense, uneasy way. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.
The artist had been deceased for about 40 annums when this account was documented.
