Who exactly was the dark-feathered deity of desire? What insights this masterpiece uncovers about the rogue artist
A youthful lad cries out while his head is firmly held, a large digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a single turn. However the father's preferred approach involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his remaining palm, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. One certain element remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable acting ability. Within exists not just fear, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.
The artist adopted a familiar scriptural story and made it so fresh and raw that its terrors appeared to happen right in front of the viewer
Viewing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a young model, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost dark pupils – appears in two other works by the master. In every case, that richly emotional visage commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a affluent residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a very real, vividly illuminated nude figure, standing over toppled-over items that comprise stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the melancholic mess is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Love sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid painted sightless," wrote the Bard, just prior to this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a city ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted numerous occasions previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening immediately before you.
Yet there was a different side to the artist, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, just skill and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but holy. That may be the very first resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his red lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass container.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for sale.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as some art scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His initial paintings do make overt sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, viewers might turn to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at you as he begins to undo the dark sash of his robe.
A several annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A English traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about forty annums when this account was documented.
