Who exactly was Caravaggio's dark-feathered god of love? What secrets that masterwork reveals about the rogue artist
The young boy cries out while his skull is firmly gripped, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his other palm, prepared to cut the boy's neck. One certain aspect remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not just fear, shock and pleading in his darkened eyes but also profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.
The artist took a well-known scriptural story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to happen right in front of the viewer
Standing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a young model, because the same youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly black pupils – features in several additional works by the master. In every instance, that highly expressive visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed child running riot in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a very tangible, vividly illuminated nude form, standing over overturned items that comprise stringed devices, a music score, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural gear strewn across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the melancholic mess is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind," penned the Bard, just before this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes directly at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the identical distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed numerous times previously and make it so fresh, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.
However there was a different aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, only talent and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's eye were anything but devout. That may be the very earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass container.
The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through images, the master portrayed a famous woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is clear: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the painter was neither the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as some art historians improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His early paintings indeed offer explicit sexual implications, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young creator, identified with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, viewers might look to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his robe.
A several years following Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with prestigious church projects? This profane pagan deity revives the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, uneasy manner. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about forty years when this story was documented.