Who was the black-winged deity of love? What insights that masterpiece uncovers about the rogue genius
A young lad cries out while his skull is firmly held, a massive thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty palm grasps him by the throat. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his remaining hand, ready to slit Isaac's neck. One certain aspect stands out – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed extraordinary expressive skill. Within exists not just fear, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.
He took a familiar scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to happen right in front of you
Viewing before the painting, viewers identify this as a real face, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost dark pupils – appears in two other works by the master. In every instance, that highly expressive face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on the city's streets, his dark plumed wings sinister, a naked child running riot in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a London gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly lit nude form, straddling overturned items that comprise musical instruments, a musical score, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – save here, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Love painted blind," wrote the Bard, just prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three images of the same unusual-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious artist in a city enflamed by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many occasions previously and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening directly in front of the spectator.
However there was another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the city, only talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the holy city's attention were anything but devout. What may be the very first hangs in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his red mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent container.
The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female prostitute, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.
What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the artist was not the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His early paintings indeed offer overt sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine gazes calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.
A few years after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan god resurrects the sexual challenges of his early works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was recorded.
