Who exactly was the dark-feathered deity of desire? What secrets this masterpiece uncovers about the rebellious artist
A youthful lad cries out as his skull is forcefully gripped, a large digit digging into his face as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural account. It seems as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single twist. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery steel knife he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. One certain element remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary expressive skill. Within exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but also profound sorrow that a protector could betray him so utterly.
He took a well-known biblical story and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold right in front of you
Standing before the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the same youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and almost dark pupils – features in several additional works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly emotional face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his black feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a very tangible, brightly illuminated nude form, standing over overturned objects that include musical devices, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master painted his multiple images of the same unusual-looking youth in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many occasions before and render it so fresh, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately before the spectator.
Yet there existed a different side to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, just talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the holy city's eye were everything but devout. That could be the very first resides in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his red lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass container.
The adolescent wears a pink flower in his hair – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through photographs, the master portrayed a famous female prostitute, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic historians improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.
His early works do offer explicit erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his robe.
A few years following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost respectable with important church commissions? This unholy pagan god resurrects the erotic challenges of his initial works but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A British traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about 40 annums when this account was recorded.
