Who was the black-winged god of love? The insights that masterwork uncovers about the rogue artist
The youthful boy screams as his head is firmly held, a massive thumb digging into his face as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the biblical account. It seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. However the father's preferred approach involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. One certain aspect remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary acting ability. There exists not just fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but also profound grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.
He took a familiar scriptural story 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 recognize this as a actual face, an precise record of a young subject, because the same youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost dark eyes – features in several other paintings by Caravaggio. In each case, that highly emotional face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black plumed wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly lit nude form, straddling overturned objects that include stringed devices, a music manuscript, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy mess is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Cupid depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the identical unusual-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a city enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been portrayed many occasions previously and render it so fresh, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring directly before the spectator.
Yet there was a different aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred metropolis's attention were everything but holy. What may be the very first hangs in London's art museum. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the murky liquid of the transparent container.
The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern art. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through images, the master portrayed a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.
What are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as some art historians improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.
His early works indeed offer overt erotic implications, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to an additional initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black sash of his robe.
A several annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with important church commissions? This unholy non-Christian god revives the erotic challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 years when this story was recorded.
