Who exactly was the black-winged deity of love? What secrets that masterpiece uncovers about the rebellious artist
A young lad screams while his head is firmly gripped, a large digit digging into his face as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single twist. However Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic grey blade he holds in his other palm, ready to slit the boy's neck. One definite element stands out – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable acting skill. There exists not just fear, shock and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so utterly.
The artist took a well-known scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in view of the viewer
Standing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a real face, an precise record of a young model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled hair and almost dark eyes – appears in several additional works by the master. In each case, that highly emotional face commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed wings demonic, a unclothed child creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated nude figure, standing over toppled-over items that include musical devices, a music score, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple portrayals of the same unusual-looking kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated religious painter in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring directly before the spectator.
Yet there existed a different side to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, only talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the holy city's eye were anything but devout. What may be the absolute first resides in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the transparent container.
The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His early works indeed offer overt erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, observers might turn to another initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he starts to undo the black sash of his robe.
A few annums after Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly established with important church commissions? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the erotic challenges of his early works but in a increasingly intense, uneasy way. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English visitor saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been deceased for about 40 years when this account was recorded.