Who was the dark-feathered deity of desire? The secrets that masterwork uncovers about the rogue artist
A youthful boy screams as his head is firmly gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the tormented youth from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a single turn. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his other palm, prepared to slit the boy's throat. A definite element remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed gaze but also profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
He took a familiar biblical story and transformed it so fresh and raw that its horrors seemed to happen right in front of the viewer
Viewing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the same youth – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost black eyes – appears in several additional paintings by the master. In every case, that highly expressive visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery wings sinister, a unclothed child creating riot in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly lit unclothed figure, straddling overturned items that comprise musical devices, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an architect's ruler. This heap of items resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and construction equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – except in this case, the melancholic disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted blind," penned the Bard, shortly before this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he struts naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred painter in a city ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical story that had been depicted many occasions previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be happening immediately in front of you.
Yet there existed another side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, only talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's attention were anything but holy. That may be the very first resides in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his red lips in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the murky waters of the glass container.
The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, Caravaggio represented a famous female prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.
What are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the artist was not the queer icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as some artistic scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His initial paintings indeed make explicit erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young creator, aligned with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares coolly at you as he starts to undo the dark sash of his garment.
A few years following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost established with prestigious church commissions? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A British traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 years when this story was recorded.