What exactly was the dark-feathered deity of love? What secrets that masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
A young boy screams while his skull is firmly held, a large thumb pressing into his face as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical account. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the silvery steel knife he holds in his other palm, ready to slit Isaac's throat. One certain aspect remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable acting ability. There exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also deep grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.
The artist adopted a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold right in view of you
Viewing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a young model, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost dark pupils – features in several additional paintings by the master. In each instance, that highly emotional visage commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his black plumed appendages sinister, a naked child creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a very tangible, vividly illuminated nude figure, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a music manuscript, metal armour and an architect's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Love painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just before this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen confidence as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three images of the same distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a city ignited by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of you.
However there was a different side to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, just talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the holy city's attention were everything but holy. That could be the absolute first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent container.
The boy sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, Caravaggio represented a famous woman courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for sale.
What are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question 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, Derek Jarman put on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some art scholars unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His early works indeed make explicit erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young artist, identified with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to an additional early work, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.
A few years following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing almost established with important church commissions? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty annums when this story was recorded.
