What exactly was Caravaggio's dark-feathered god of love? The insights that masterwork reveals about the rogue genius
The youthful lad screams while his skull is firmly gripped, a large digit pressing into his face as his parent's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen method involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his other hand, ready to cut the boy's throat. A certain element remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing piece displayed remarkable acting skill. Within exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
He took a familiar biblical tale and made it so fresh and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in view of you
Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and nearly black pupils – appears in two other paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly expressive face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his black plumed wings demonic, a unclothed child running riot in a well-to-do dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly lit nude figure, standing over overturned items that comprise stringed instruments, a music manuscript, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction equipment scattered across the floor in the German master's print Melancholy – save here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love painted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly before this work was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the identical distinctive-looking youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted numerous occasions before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring directly in front of you.
However there existed another side to the artist, evident as soon as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but devout. That may be the absolute earliest resides in London's art museum. A young man parts his red mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the murky waters of the glass container.
The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for sale.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical reality is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art historians improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.
His initial works do make explicit sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might look to an additional early creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he begins to untie the dark sash of his robe.
A several annums following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost established with prestigious church projects? This profane non-Christian god revives the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.
The artist had been dead for about forty years when this account was recorded.
