What was the black-winged god of love? What insights this masterwork reveals about the rogue genius
A youthful lad screams while his head is firmly gripped, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his parent's powerful palm holds him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a single twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the metallic grey blade he holds in his remaining palm, ready to slit the boy's throat. One certain aspect remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but also deep grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
He took a familiar biblical story and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold right in view of you
Viewing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a young subject, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark eyes – features in several additional works by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly expressive face commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a affluent residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a very tangible, vividly illuminated unclothed figure, standing over overturned items that include stringed instruments, a music manuscript, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melancholy – except here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Love sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love depicted sightless," penned the Bard, just prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares straight at you. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the identical unusual-looking kid in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions before and make it so fresh, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be happening directly before you.
However there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he came in the capital in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, just talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's attention were anything but devout. That may be the absolute first resides in London's art museum. A youth opens his red mouth in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass vase.
The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic commerce in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through photographs, the master portrayed a famous woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the artist was not the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as some artistic historians improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.
His early works indeed offer explicit erotic suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to an additional initial work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark sash of his robe.
A few annums following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost respectable with prestigious church projects? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty years when this story was recorded.