What was Caravaggio's black-winged deity of love? The secrets that masterpiece reveals about the rebellious artist
A young lad cries out as his head is forcefully gripped, a large thumb digging into his face as his father's mighty hand holds him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented youth from the biblical account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single turn. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his other palm, prepared to slit the boy's throat. A certain aspect remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but also deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so utterly.
He adopted a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold right in front of you
Standing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly dark pupils – appears in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very real, vividly lit nude form, straddling overturned items that comprise musical devices, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the melancholic disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love depicted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master created his three images of the same unusual-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions previously and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening directly before the spectator.
Yet there was a different side to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, only skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were everything but holy. That could be the very first resides in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: observers can see the painter's dismal room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.
The adolescent wears a pink flower in his hair – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.
How are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.
His early paintings do offer overt sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to another initial creation, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black sash of his robe.
A several annums following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with important church projects? This unholy pagan god revives the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid 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 adolescent was Francesco.
The artist had been dead for about forty annums when this account was documented.
