Who was the black-winged deity of love? The secrets this masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist
The young boy cries out while his skull is forcefully held, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand holds him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single turn. However the father's preferred approach involves the metallic grey blade he holds in his other palm, prepared to cut the boy's neck. A definite aspect stands out – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary acting skill. Within exists not just dread, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but also deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
He took a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen directly in front of the viewer
Viewing before the painting, observers identify this as a real face, an precise depiction of a adolescent subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled hair and almost dark eyes – appears in several additional works by Caravaggio. In every case, that richly emotional face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness acquired on Rome's streets, his black feathery appendages sinister, a naked child creating riot in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often painful longing, is shown as a very real, brightly lit unclothed figure, standing over overturned items that include musical devices, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – save here, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love depicted blind," wrote the Bard, just prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three portrayals of the same distinctive-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror seemed to be happening immediately before the spectator.
However there was a different side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, only talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's attention were everything but holy. That may be the absolute earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: observers can see the painter's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent container.
The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Venetian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through images, the master represented a famous woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some art scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His early works do offer overt sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, viewers might look to another initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black sash of his robe.
A several years after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with prestigious church projects? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the erotic challenges of his early paintings but in a increasingly intense, uneasy manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty years when this account was recorded.
