Who exactly was Caravaggio's dark-feathered god of love? The insights that masterwork uncovers about the rebellious genius
The young lad cries out as his skull is firmly held, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a single twist. However the father's preferred method involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his remaining hand, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. One certain element remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a protector could betray him so completely.
The artist took a familiar biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold right in front of the viewer
Standing before the painting, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly dark pupils – features in two other paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly emotional face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness acquired on the city's streets, his black plumed wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a very tangible, vividly lit nude figure, standing over overturned items that include stringed instruments, a music score, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just before this work was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master painted his three images of the identical unusual-looking kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated religious painter in a city enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many times before and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.
However there was another side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial twenties with no mentor or patron in the city, just skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were anything but holy. That could be the very first resides in London's National Gallery. A young man opens his crimson mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass container.
The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through images, the master portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.
How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.
His initial paintings indeed offer overt sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to another initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at you as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.
A several annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last becoming almost established with important ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about forty annums when this account was recorded.
