What exactly was Caravaggio's black-winged god of desire? What insights this masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
The youthful lad cries out as his skull is firmly held, a large digit pressing into his face as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural account. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single twist. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his other palm, ready to cut Isaac's neck. A definite element remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not only fear, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but also deep sorrow that a protector could betray him so utterly.
The artist adopted a well-known biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to happen right in front of the viewer
Standing before the painting, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly black pupils – appears in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly emotional face dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the darkness while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his dark feathery appendages sinister, a naked child running riot in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very tangible, brightly lit unclothed figure, straddling overturned objects that comprise musical devices, a music score, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melancholy – except here, the melancholic disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can release.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted blind," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master created his multiple images of the same distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a city ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been portrayed many occasions previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring directly before the spectator.
However there was a different aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, just skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were anything but devout. What could be the very first resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass container.
The adolescent sports a pink flower in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the artist was not the queer hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic historians improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His early paintings do make overt sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, observers might look to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he begins to untie the dark sash of his robe.
A few annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly established with prestigious church commissions? This unholy non-Christian deity revives the erotic challenges of his early paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A British traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The artist had been dead for about 40 years when this story was recorded.
