Who exactly was Caravaggio's dark-feathered deity of love? What insights that masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
A young boy screams while his head is forcefully held, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his other hand, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. A certain element stands out – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable acting ability. Within exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but also deep grief that a protector could abandon him so completely.
The artist took a well-known scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen directly in view of you
Viewing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a real face, an precise record of a young model, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark pupils – appears in two additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive visage commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his dark feathery wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a very tangible, vividly illuminated nude figure, straddling overturned items that include musical devices, a music manuscript, plate armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in the German master's print Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with bold confidence as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a city ignited by religious revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted numerous times previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be happening immediately in front of you.
Yet there existed another aspect to the artist, evident as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, just talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the holy city's attention were everything but devout. That may be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's dismal room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent container.
The boy sports a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, the master represented a famous woman prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is clear: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators ever since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art historians improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.
His initial works do make explicit erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, observers might look to an additional initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at you as he starts to undo the black sash of his robe.
A few years following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly established with important ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly intense, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was recorded.
