What exactly was the dark-feathered god of love? What insights this masterwork uncovers about the rogue artist
A young lad screams as his skull is forcefully gripped, a large thumb digging into his face as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented youth from the biblical account. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by God to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single twist. However the father's chosen method involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his other palm, ready to slit Isaac's neck. One definite aspect remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed eyes but additionally profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.
The artist took a familiar scriptural story and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in front of you
Standing before the painting, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly dark eyes – features in several additional works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly expressive face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed child creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing longing, is shown as a very real, brightly illuminated nude figure, straddling toppled-over items that include stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an architect's T-square. This pile of possessions echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the melancholic disorder is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted blind," penned Shakespeare, just before this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he poses naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the same unusual-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been depicted many occasions previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately before you.
However there was another side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, only skill and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the holy city's attention were everything but devout. What could be the very first resides in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his red mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass container.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through images, the master portrayed a renowned female courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some art scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His early paintings indeed make overt sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to an additional initial work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine gazes calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark sash of his robe.
A several annums following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing almost respectable with important church projects? This profane pagan god resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about forty years when this story was documented.