Who exactly was the dark-feathered god of love? What insights this masterwork uncovers about the rebellious artist
A young boy cries out as his head is firmly held, a large digit pressing into his face as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his remaining palm, ready to cut the boy's throat. A certain element remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not just dread, shock and begging in his darkened gaze but also profound sorrow that a protector could betray him so utterly.
He adopted a familiar scriptural story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen right in view of the viewer
Standing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost black pupils – appears in two other paintings by Caravaggio. In each case, that richly expressive visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his black feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed child creating riot in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very real, brightly lit unclothed figure, standing over toppled-over items that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in the German master's print Melancholy – save here, the melancholic disorder is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid painted blind," wrote the Bard, just prior to this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master created his three images of the same distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a city ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous times previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately in front of you.
However there was a different side to the artist, evident as quickly as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, just talent and boldness. The majority of the works with which he caught the sacred city's eye were everything but holy. What may be the absolute first resides in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson lips 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 squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent container.
The boy wears a pink blossom in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans holding blooms and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned female courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His initial paintings indeed offer explicit sexual implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black sash of his garment.
A few annums following Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing almost established with important church commissions? This unholy pagan god revives the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.
The artist had been dead for about forty annums when this account was recorded.