What exactly was the dark-feathered god of love? The secrets that masterwork uncovers about the rebellious genius
The young boy screams as his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive digit pressing into his face as his father's powerful hand holds him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a single twist. However Abraham's chosen method involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his other hand, prepared to cut the boy's throat. A definite element stands out – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable expressive skill. Within exists not just fear, shock and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
The artist took a familiar scriptural tale and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen directly in front of the viewer
Standing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a real face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost black eyes – appears in two other works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly emotional visage commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his dark feathery appendages demonic, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very real, vividly illuminated nude form, straddling overturned objects that include stringed devices, a music manuscript, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love painted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly prior to this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares straight at you. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious artist in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many occasions previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror seemed to be happening immediately in front of you.
Yet there was another side to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, just skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the holy city's eye were everything but devout. What may be the absolute earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his red lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent container.
The adolescent sports a pink blossom in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through images, the master represented a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated historical reality is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.
His initial works do make explicit erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark sash of his garment.
A several years following Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly established with important church projects? This profane pagan deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his early works but in a more powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about forty annums when this story was documented.