What was the dark-feathered god of desire? What insights that masterwork uncovers about the rogue artist
The youthful lad screams as his head is firmly gripped, a large digit digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the neck. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could break his neck with a single twist. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery steel knife he holds in his other hand, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. A certain aspect remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but also profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
The artist adopted a familiar biblical story and made it so fresh and raw that its terrors seemed to happen directly in view of you
Viewing in front of the painting, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise record of a young subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark pupils – appears in several additional paintings by the master. In each case, that highly expressive face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his dark plumed wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with often painful desire, is shown as a extremely real, vividly lit unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over objects that include musical devices, a music manuscript, metal armor and an architect's T-square. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love painted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master painted his three images of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted numerous occasions before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be happening immediately before the spectator.
Yet there was a different side to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, only skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy city's eye were anything but devout. What could be the very earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his red mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the murky liquid of the glass container.
The boy sports a pink blossom in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female prostitute, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.
How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as some art scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His early works do offer overt erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might look to an additional initial work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at you as he starts to untie the dark sash of his robe.
A several annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with important ecclesiastical projects? This unholy pagan god resurrects the sexual provocations of his early works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A English traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about forty annums when this account was recorded.
