Who exactly was the dark-feathered god of love? The insights that masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist
The young boy cries out as his skull is firmly gripped, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a single turn. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the silvery steel knife he holds in his remaining hand, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. One certain aspect remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable expressive skill. There exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but also deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
The artist adopted a well-known scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to happen directly in front of you
Standing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a real face, an precise depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost black eyes – features in two additional paintings by the master. In every case, that richly expressive visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his dark plumed appendages demonic, a naked child creating riot in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a very real, brightly illuminated nude figure, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise stringed devices, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of items echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save here, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love painted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly before this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the same unusual-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred 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 depicted many times previously and render it so fresh, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be happening immediately before you.
However there was another side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were anything but devout. That could be the absolute first resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's dismal room reflected in the murky waters of the glass container.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through images, the master represented a renowned female prostitute, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for purchase.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some art scholars unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His initial works do offer overt erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.
A few annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly established with important church commissions? This profane non-Christian deity revives the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty years when this story was documented.
