What was Caravaggio's dark-feathered god of love? What insights that masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
The young boy screams as his skull is forcefully held, a massive thumb digging into his face as his parent's mighty hand holds him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a single turn. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his remaining palm, prepared to cut the boy's neck. A definite aspect remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece demonstrated remarkable acting ability. Within exists not only fear, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so utterly.
The artist adopted a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in view of the viewer
Viewing in front of the painting, observers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark eyes – appears in several other paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly expressive face dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery wings sinister, a naked child running chaos in a affluent residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a very real, brightly lit nude form, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise stringed devices, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the melancholic disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Cupid painted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just prior to this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated sacred painter in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed numerous times previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring directly before you.
Yet there existed a different aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the holy city's eye were anything but devout. That may be the absolute first resides in London's art museum. A young man opens his red mouth in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master represented a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for purchase.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His initial paintings do make explicit sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to another initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his garment.
A several years after Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his early works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The artist had been dead for about forty annums when this story was documented.
