What was the dark-feathered deity of love? The secrets that masterpiece uncovers about the rogue genius
A youthful boy cries out as his head is forcefully gripped, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the neck. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural account. It seems as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his other palm, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. One definite aspect stands out – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing piece displayed extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not only fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
He adopted a familiar scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in front of you
Viewing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly black eyes – features in several additional paintings by the master. In each case, that highly emotional face dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his dark plumed wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a London museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a very real, brightly illuminated unclothed form, straddling overturned items that include musical instruments, a musical score, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This pile of possessions echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save in this case, the gloomy mess is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Cupid painted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a city enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted many times previously and make it so fresh, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring directly before the spectator.
Yet there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, just talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the holy city's eye were anything but devout. What may be the absolute first resides in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his red mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.
The adolescent wears a pink blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but documented through images, the master portrayed a famous female prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for purchase.
How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.
His early works do make explicit erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to another early creation, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to undo the dark sash of his robe.
A few annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty years when this account was documented.
