Who exactly was the black-winged god of love? What insights that masterpiece reveals about the rebellious artist
A youthful boy screams while his skull is firmly gripped, a massive digit digging into his face as his parent's powerful palm holds him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the metallic grey blade he holds in his remaining hand, ready to cut Isaac's neck. One certain aspect stands out – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but also deep grief that a protector could betray him so utterly.
The artist took a well-known scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in front of you
Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost dark pupils – features in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly expressive face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness acquired on the city's streets, his dark feathery wings sinister, a unclothed child creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly lit unclothed form, standing over overturned items that comprise stringed devices, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master created his three portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many occasions before and make it so fresh, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be happening immediately before you.
However there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's eye were everything but holy. That may be the very earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his red mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy room reflected in the murky waters of the transparent vase.
The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic trade in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through images, the master portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.
What are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His early works do offer overt erotic implications, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with the city's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.
A few years after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This profane pagan god revives the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about 40 years when this account was documented.
