Who exactly was the black-winged god of desire? The insights that masterwork uncovers about the rebellious genius
A youthful lad screams while his head is forcefully held, a large thumb pressing into his face as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his remaining palm, ready to slit Isaac's neck. A definite aspect stands out – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive skill. Within exists not just dread, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but additionally profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.
He took a familiar scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to happen directly in front of the viewer
Viewing before the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise record of a young subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark pupils – appears in several additional works by the master. In every case, that highly emotional 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 hardness learned on Rome's streets, his dark plumed wings sinister, a naked adolescent running chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a very tangible, brightly lit nude figure, straddling 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 scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – save in this case, the melancholic disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love depicted blind," wrote the Bard, just before this work was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three portrayals of the same unusual-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a city enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous times before and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening directly before the spectator.
Yet there was another side to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, just talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the holy city's eye were everything but devout. That could be the absolute earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can see the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the murky liquid of the glass container.
The adolescent wears a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, the master represented a famous female prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for sale.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.
His early paintings do make explicit sexual implications, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might look to an additional early creation, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he starts to undo the dark sash of his garment.
A several years following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost established with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a more intense, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been deceased for about 40 years when this account was documented.
