Who was the black-winged deity of desire? The insights this masterpiece reveals about the rogue genius
The young boy screams while his head is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical account. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen method involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his other palm, ready to slit the boy's neck. A certain aspect remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing piece displayed extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not just dread, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but also profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.
He adopted a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in front of the viewer
Standing before the painting, observers identify this as a real face, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly black pupils – appears in several other works by the master. In each instance, that highly expressive visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his black plumed appendages sinister, a naked child creating riot in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a very tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over objects that include musical devices, a musical score, plate armour and an architect's T-square. This pile of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction equipment scattered across the floor in the German master's print Melancholy – except here, the gloomy mess is caused by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he poses 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 youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred artist in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted numerous occasions before and render it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring directly before you.
However there was a different aspect to the artist, evident as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no teacher or patron in the urban center, just talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's eye were everything but holy. That could be the very earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A youth parts his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the transparent container.
The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through photographs, the master represented a famous woman prostitute, holding a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for sale.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His initial works do make explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black sash of his garment.
A several years following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost established with important church commissions? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the sexual challenges of his early works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was recorded.
