What exactly was the black-winged deity of desire? What insights this masterpiece uncovers about the rogue artist
A youthful lad screams while his skull is firmly gripped, a large digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a single turn. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his remaining palm, ready to cut Isaac's neck. A certain element remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing piece displayed extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not only fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
He took a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold right in view of the viewer
Standing before the painting, observers recognize this as a real face, an precise record of a young model, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly black eyes – appears in two other paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly emotional face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness acquired on the city's streets, his black plumed wings sinister, a naked adolescent running chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly lit nude figure, standing over toppled-over items that include stringed devices, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid depicted blind," penned Shakespeare, just before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror appeared to be happening directly in front of you.
Yet there existed another side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he came in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, only skill and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy metropolis's eye were everything but devout. That may be the very first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.
The boy wears a pink blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has split his commentators since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic historians improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His early paintings do offer explicit sexual suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to another initial creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black sash of his garment.
A several annums after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly established with important church projects? This unholy non-Christian god revives the sexual provocations of his early works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A English traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 years when this story was recorded.
