Who was the dark-feathered deity of love? What secrets that masterpiece uncovers about the rebellious artist
The young lad screams while his head is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his father's mighty palm holds him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. However the father's chosen method involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his other palm, ready to cut the boy's throat. One certain aspect stands out – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
The artist took a familiar scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in view of you
Standing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate record of a young model, because the same youth – recognizable by his tousled hair and nearly black pupils – features in two additional works by the master. In every case, that highly expressive face commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black plumed wings sinister, a unclothed child running riot in a affluent residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often painful desire, is shown as a very tangible, vividly lit nude form, standing over overturned items that comprise musical instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an architect's T-square. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – save in this case, the melancholic mess is caused by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the same unusual-appearing kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been portrayed numerous times previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be happening immediately before the spectator.
However there was another aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, only talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the holy city's eye were anything but devout. That may be the absolute earliest hangs in London's art museum. A youth parts his red mouth in a yell of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent vase.
The adolescent sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous woman prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of boys – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated past reality is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some art historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His early works indeed offer overt erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, identified with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares calmly at you as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his robe.
A several annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with important church commissions? This profane pagan deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about forty years when this account was documented.
