What exactly was the black-winged deity of love? The secrets that masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist
The young boy cries out while his skull is firmly gripped, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could break his neck with a solitary turn. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his remaining palm, ready to cut the boy's neck. A definite element stands out – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated remarkable acting ability. Within exists not only fear, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but also deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.
He took a familiar biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and raw that its horrors appeared to happen right in front of you
Viewing in front of the artwork, observers recognize this as a real face, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost black eyes – features in two additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each case, that highly expressive visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed child creating riot in a affluent residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is portrayed as a very real, brightly illuminated unclothed form, straddling overturned items that comprise musical instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except here, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love depicted blind," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares straight at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a metropolis ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted many times before and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring directly before you.
However there was a different side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, only talent and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's attention were everything but holy. What may be the very earliest hangs in London's art museum. A youth parts his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.
The adolescent sports a pink blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in early modern art. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned female prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain art scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His early paintings do make explicit sexual implications, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might look to another initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of wine gazes calmly at you as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his garment.
A several annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about forty years when this account was documented.
