Who was the dark-feathered deity of desire? The insights this masterwork reveals about the rogue artist
The youthful lad cries out as his skull is firmly held, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical account. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a single turn. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his other hand, ready to cut Isaac's neck. A definite aspect stands out – whomever posed as Isaac for this astonishing piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but also profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
He adopted a familiar biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold directly in front of you
Standing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual countenance, an accurate record of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost dark pupils – features in several other paintings by Caravaggio. In each case, that richly emotional visage commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery wings demonic, a unclothed child creating riot in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very tangible, brightly lit nude figure, straddling overturned items that include stringed devices, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save in this case, the melancholic mess is created by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Love painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the same unusual-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated religious painter in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many occasions before and make it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately before the spectator.
Yet there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only skill and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were everything but holy. What could be the very first hangs in London's art museum. A youth parts his red mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass container.
The boy sports a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for purchase.
What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His initial paintings do make overt erotic implications, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to another early work, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at you as he starts to untie the dark sash of his robe.
A few annums after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with important church projects? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a more intense, uneasy way. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A British traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was recorded.
