Who was Caravaggio's black-winged god of love? What insights that masterwork uncovers about the rebellious artist
The youthful lad cries out while his head is forcefully held, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his father's powerful palm holds him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical account. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could break his neck with a solitary twist. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his remaining palm, ready to slit Isaac's throat. A definite element remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not just fear, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
The artist took a familiar scriptural story and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to happen directly in view of you
Standing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the same youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly dark pupils – features in two other paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his dark plumed wings sinister, a naked child running riot in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a London museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling overturned objects that include stringed devices, a music manuscript, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy mess is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just before this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes straight at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a city ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous times previously and render it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring directly before the spectator.
Yet there existed another side to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only skill and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's attention were everything but devout. That may be the very first resides in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his red mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the murky waters of the transparent container.
The boy wears a pink blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for sale.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the artist was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some art historians improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.
His early works do offer explicit sexual suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might look to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to undo the dark sash of his garment.
A few years after the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical projects? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his early works but in a more powerful, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about forty years when this account was recorded.
