Who exactly was the black-winged god of desire? What secrets this masterpiece reveals about the rebellious artist
The young boy screams as his skull is firmly gripped, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the biblical account. It seems as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his neck with a single twist. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic grey knife he grips in his other hand, ready to slit Isaac's throat. One certain aspect remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed extraordinary acting ability. There exists not only fear, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but also deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
He took a familiar scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in view of the viewer
Standing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate record of a adolescent subject, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled hair and nearly black pupils – features in two other works by Caravaggio. In each case, that highly emotional visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his black plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed child running riot in a well-to-do dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very real, brightly lit unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over items that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, metal armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Cupid painted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just before this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he poses naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master created his multiple images of the same unusual-appearing kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many times before and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring directly before you.
Yet there existed a different aspect to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were everything but devout. That may be the very earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's dismal room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.
The boy wears a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through images, the master portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some art historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.
His initial works do make explicit sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, aligned with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, observers might look to an additional early creation, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine gazes calmly at you as he starts to untie the dark sash of his robe.
A several years following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming almost respectable with prestigious church projects? This unholy pagan god revives the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A English traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about 40 annums when this account was documented.
