What was the black-winged god of desire? What secrets this masterpiece reveals about the rebellious artist
A young boy cries out as his skull is firmly held, a large digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural account. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary twist. However the father's chosen approach involves the metallic grey knife he grips in his other hand, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. One definite element stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.
He took a well-known biblical tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in front of the viewer
Standing in front of the painting, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate record of a young model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost dark eyes – appears in several other works by the master. In each instance, that richly expressive visage commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his black feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is portrayed as a very tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed form, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise musical devices, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Cupid painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted numerous occasions before and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening immediately in front of the spectator.
Yet there was another aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, just skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the sacred city's attention were anything but holy. What could be the absolute earliest hangs in London's art museum. A youth parts his red lips in a scream of agony: while reaching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent container.
The boy wears a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but known through images, the master portrayed a renowned female courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for purchase.
How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as some art historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His initial works do make overt sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to an additional early creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black ribbon of his garment.
A several years after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly established with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian deity revives the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.
The artist had been dead for about forty years when this story was recorded.
