Who exactly was the black-winged deity of desire? What insights that masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist
The young lad screams while his head is firmly held, a massive thumb digging into his face as his father's powerful hand holds him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the biblical account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery steel knife he holds in his other palm, ready to cut the boy's throat. One certain element remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
The artist took a well-known biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold right in view of you
Standing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate record of a young model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost dark pupils – features in several additional works by the master. In each case, that richly expressive face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed wings sinister, a naked adolescent running riot in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful longing, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly illuminated nude figure, standing over overturned items that comprise stringed instruments, a musical score, metal armor and an architect's T-square. This pile of items echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the same unusual-looking kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a city enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be happening directly in front of the spectator.
However there was another aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were everything but devout. What could be the very earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his red mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy room mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass container.
The boy sports a rose-colored flower in his hair – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, holding a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His early works indeed offer overt erotic suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to another initial work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.
A few annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with important church projects? This unholy pagan god resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A British traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty years when this account was documented.
