What was Caravaggio's dark-feathered god of desire? What secrets this masterwork uncovers about the rogue genius
A young boy cries out while his skull is firmly gripped, a large digit digging into his face as his father's mighty hand holds him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the scriptural narrative. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a single turn. Yet the father's preferred method involves the silvery grey blade he holds in his remaining hand, prepared to slit Isaac's throat. A definite aspect stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed remarkable expressive ability. There exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed gaze but also deep grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.
He adopted a well-known scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to happen right in view of you
Standing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the same youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost black eyes – appears in two additional works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly emotional face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his black feathery appendages sinister, a naked child creating riot in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly lit nude figure, straddling overturned items that include musical devices, a music manuscript, plate armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of items resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – except in this case, the melancholic mess is created by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Cupid depicted blind," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master painted his multiple images of the identical unusual-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many times previously and render it so fresh, so raw and physical that the terror seemed to be happening immediately in front of the spectator.
However there was a different side to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a artist in his early twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, only skill and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred metropolis's attention were everything but devout. That may be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's gloomy room reflected in the murky waters of the transparent container.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master represented a famous woman prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex historical reality is that the painter was not the homosexual icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain art scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His early works indeed make overt sexual implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black sash of his robe.
A several annums after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian deity revives the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, uneasy manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A English traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.
The artist had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was recorded.