Who was Caravaggio's black-winged deity of love? The secrets this masterpiece uncovers about the rebellious artist
The youthful lad screams while his skull is firmly held, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the throat. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the biblical account. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. However Abraham's chosen method involves the metallic steel blade he grips in his other hand, ready to slit Isaac's neck. One certain aspect remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. There exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but also profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
The artist adopted a well-known scriptural story and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen directly in view of you
Standing before the artwork, observers identify this as a real countenance, an accurate record of a young subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark eyes – features in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly emotional visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness acquired on the city's streets, his dark plumed wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is portrayed as a very real, brightly illuminated nude figure, straddling toppled-over items that comprise musical devices, a musical score, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction equipment scattered across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly prior to this work was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed many occasions before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be happening directly before the spectator.
However there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial twenties with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred city's attention were everything but holy. That could be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his red lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent container.
The adolescent wears a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master represented a famous woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.
What are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the artist was not the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.
His initial paintings do make overt erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young creator, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, observers might look to an additional early work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.
A few years following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a more intense, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about forty years when this account was documented.
