What was the dark-feathered deity of desire? What secrets that masterwork reveals about the rebellious genius
The young lad cries out as his head is forcefully gripped, a large digit digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a single twist. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his other hand, ready to slit Isaac's neck. One certain element remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not just fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but additionally profound grief that a protector could betray him so utterly.
He adopted a well-known biblical story and transformed it so fresh and raw that its horrors appeared to happen right in front of the viewer
Standing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly black pupils – appears in two additional works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly expressive visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black plumed wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a London gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, standing over toppled-over items that comprise musical instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This pile of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master painted his multiple images of the same distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted numerous times before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately before you.
However there existed another side to the artist, evident as soon as he came in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, just skill and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy city's attention were anything but holy. What may be the very earliest resides in London's art museum. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the murky waters of the glass vase.
The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in early modern art. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for sale.
What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the painter was not the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art historians improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.
His initial works indeed offer overt erotic implications, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young creator, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to an additional early creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes calmly at you as he starts to undo the black ribbon of his robe.
A few annums after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost respectable with important ecclesiastical projects? This unholy pagan deity revives the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A English visitor viewed 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 identity of this adolescent was Cecco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was recorded.