What exactly was the dark-feathered deity of love? What secrets this masterpiece uncovers about the rebellious genius
The young boy cries out while his skull is firmly held, a massive thumb digging into his face as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the scriptural narrative. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a single turn. However Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic grey blade he holds in his other palm, prepared to slit the boy's throat. One definite element stands out – whomever posed as Isaac for this astonishing piece displayed extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not just dread, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
He took a well-known scriptural story and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to happen right in front of you
Standing before the painting, observers identify this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a adolescent subject, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled hair and nearly black pupils – features in several additional works by the master. In each case, that richly emotional visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a very tangible, brightly lit unclothed form, standing over overturned items that comprise stringed devices, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted sightless," wrote the Bard, just prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the same unusual-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious artist in a city ignited by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions before and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening immediately in front of you.
However there was a different side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, only talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's attention were anything but devout. What may be the very first hangs in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.
The boy sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the artist was not the homosexual icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His early paintings indeed make explicit erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young creator, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might look to an additional early creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he begins to untie the black sash of his garment.
A several years after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly established with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian god revives the sexual provocations of his early works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A English visitor saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was recorded.
