What exactly was the dark-feathered god of love? What insights this masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist
A youthful boy screams while his head is firmly gripped, a large thumb digging into his face as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural account. It seems as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a single twist. Yet Abraham's preferred method involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his other palm, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. One certain element remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary acting skill. There exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
The artist adopted a well-known biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to happen right in front of you
Standing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost dark eyes – features in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each case, that highly emotional face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his black feathery appendages sinister, a naked child creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly lit nude form, standing over overturned objects that comprise stringed devices, a music score, plate armour and an architect's T-square. This pile of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except in this case, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love depicted sightless," penned the Bard, just before this work was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold confidence as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master painted his three images of the identical unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed numerous times previously and render it so new, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately before you.
Yet there was another side to the artist, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, just talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the sacred city's attention were anything but devout. That could be the absolute first resides in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his red lips in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent container.
The adolescent wears a pink blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but known through images, the master represented a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.
What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – 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 painter was not the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His early paintings do make overt erotic implications, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might look to an additional initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at you as he begins to undo the dark sash of his robe.
A few annums following Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a more intense, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about forty annums when this account was recorded.