Who was the dark-feathered god of love? What secrets that masterpiece uncovers about the rogue artist
A youthful lad screams as his head is firmly held, a large thumb digging into his face as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a single turn. However the father's preferred approach involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his other palm, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. One definite element stands out – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable acting ability. Within exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a protector could betray him so completely.
The artist took a well-known biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to happen directly in front of you
Viewing before the painting, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an accurate record of a young model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost dark eyes – features in several additional works by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly expressive visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black feathery wings sinister, a naked child running riot in a well-to-do dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a very real, vividly lit nude figure, standing over toppled-over items that include musical devices, a music manuscript, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save in this case, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love depicted blind," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master created his multiple images of the same unusual-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a metropolis ignited by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted many times previously and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring directly before the spectator.
Yet there existed another aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, just talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred city's eye were anything but holy. What may be the very earliest resides in London's art museum. A youth opens his red lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass container.
The boy sports a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned female prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical reality is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.
His initial works indeed offer explicit erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young creator, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at you as he starts to untie the black sash of his garment.
A several years following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with important church commissions? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A British visitor saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.
The artist had been dead for about 40 annums when this story was recorded.
