What was the black-winged deity of desire? What insights that masterpiece reveals about the rogue genius
The youthful boy cries out as his skull is forcefully held, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the biblical account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could break his neck with a solitary turn. However Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his other palm, ready to cut Isaac's throat. A certain element stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated remarkable acting skill. There exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
The artist adopted a familiar scriptural story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold directly in front of you
Viewing in front of the artwork, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a young subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost black pupils – features in two additional works by the master. In every instance, that richly emotional visage commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a naked child creating riot in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated unclothed figure, standing over overturned items that comprise musical devices, a music score, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's engraving Melancholy – except here, the gloomy mess is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Love sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love depicted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just before this work was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the same unusual-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a city ignited by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been portrayed numerous times previously and render it so new, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of you.
Yet there was another side to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, just talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were anything but devout. What could be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth parts his red lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.
The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.
How are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the artist was not the homosexual icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.
His early works do make overt sexual implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young creator, aligned with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, observers might turn to another initial creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black sash of his robe.
A few years after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost established with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the erotic challenges of his early paintings but in a more intense, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait 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 laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty years when this account was recorded.
