What exactly was the black-winged god of desire? What secrets this masterwork uncovers about the rebellious artist
The young boy cries out while his head is firmly held, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. However the father's preferred method involves the metallic steel blade he grips in his other palm, ready to cut Isaac's neck. A certain element remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing piece displayed remarkable expressive skill. Within exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but also profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
The artist adopted a familiar scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen directly in view of you
Viewing before the painting, observers identify this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled hair and almost black pupils – features in two other paintings by Caravaggio. In each case, that richly expressive visage commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness acquired on the city's alleys, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a very real, brightly illuminated nude figure, standing over toppled-over items that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted blind," penned Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the identical unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted many times previously and make it so fresh, so raw and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately before the spectator.
However there was another side to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, only skill and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy city's eye were everything but devout. What could be the absolute first resides in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his red mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.
The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous woman prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past reality is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.
His early paintings indeed offer explicit erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might look to an additional initial work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black sash of his robe.
A several years following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian deity revives the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about forty years when this account was recorded.
