Who was Caravaggio's black-winged god of love? The insights that masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
The young lad cries out as his head is forcefully held, a massive thumb digging into his face as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through the artist's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a single turn. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic grey blade he holds in his other palm, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. A definite aspect remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable acting skill. Within exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed gaze but also profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
The artist took a familiar biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in view of you
Viewing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise record of a young subject, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark eyes – appears in two additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly emotional face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his dark feathery wings demonic, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated nude figure, straddling toppled-over objects that include musical instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melancholy – except here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love painted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly before this work was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with bold confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master painted his multiple images of the same distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous times before and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.
However there was another aspect to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the sacred metropolis's attention were anything but devout. What could be the very earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth parts his red mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent container.
The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but known through images, the master portrayed a renowned female prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for purchase.
What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex historical reality is that the artist was not the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as some art historians unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.
His early paintings indeed offer explicit sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might look to an additional early work, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he starts to untie the dark sash of his robe.
A few years following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing almost respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty annums when this story was recorded.
