Who was the dark-feathered god of desire? The insights that masterwork reveals about the rogue artist
The youthful lad screams while his skull is forcefully held, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful palm holds him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary turn. However the father's chosen approach involves the metallic grey knife he holds in his other palm, prepared to slit the boy's throat. A definite element stands out – whomever posed as Isaac for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable acting skill. Within exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
The artist took a well-known scriptural story and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen directly in view of you
Standing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a real face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost black eyes – appears in several additional works by the master. In every instance, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's streets, his black plumed appendages sinister, a naked child creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a very tangible, brightly lit nude form, straddling toppled-over items that include musical devices, a music score, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Cupid depicted blind," penned Shakespeare, just prior to this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master painted his multiple images of the same distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a city ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted many times before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of you.
Yet there was another aspect to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the holy city's attention were anything but holy. What could be the very earliest resides in London's art museum. A young man opens his crimson mouth in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see the painter's dismal room mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass container.
The adolescent sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female prostitute, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.
What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.
His initial works do make explicit erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, observers might turn to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.
A several years following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost established with important ecclesiastical projects? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid 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 slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about 40 years when this story was recorded.
