What exactly was Caravaggio's black-winged deity of desire? The insights this masterwork reveals about the rogue artist
The youthful boy screams while his head is forcefully held, a large thumb digging into his face as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the biblical account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. However Abraham's chosen method involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his remaining hand, ready to cut Isaac's neck. A definite element stands out – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. There exists not just fear, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but also deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.
He took a well-known scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to happen right in front of you
Standing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a young subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark pupils – appears in several other works by the master. In each case, that highly expressive face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his black feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed child creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a very tangible, vividly lit nude figure, straddling overturned items that comprise musical devices, a musical score, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Love depicted blind," penned the Bard, just before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the identical unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred artist in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted numerous occasions previously and make it so new, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately before you.
However there was another side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, just skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's attention were anything but holy. What could be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see the painter's gloomy room reflected in the murky waters of the glass vase.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a work lost in the second world war but known through images, the master portrayed a renowned female prostitute, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for purchase.
What are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some art historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His initial paintings indeed offer explicit erotic suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might look to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at you as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his robe.
A few annums following Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian god revives the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a more powerful, unsettling way. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been deceased for about 40 years when this account was documented.
