Who exactly was the dark-feathered deity of desire? What insights this masterpiece reveals about the rebellious genius
A young boy cries out while his head is firmly gripped, a large digit digging into his cheek as his father's powerful hand holds him by the throat. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical account. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary twist. Yet the father's chosen method involves the silvery grey blade he grips in his other hand, ready to cut the boy's throat. One certain element remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary expressive skill. Within exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.
He took a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen right in front of you
Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost dark pupils – features in two other works by Caravaggio. In every case, that richly emotional face dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery wings demonic, a unclothed child creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly lit unclothed form, standing over overturned items that comprise musical instruments, a music score, metal armor and an architect's ruler. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted blind," penned the Bard, just before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes straight at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with bold assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the same unusual-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions before and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.
Yet there was a different side to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he came in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, only skill and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the holy city's attention were everything but devout. What may be the very first resides in London's National Gallery. A young man opens his red lips in a yell of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see the painter's gloomy room reflected in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a famous female courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the artist was not the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain art historians improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His initial works do make explicit sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at you as he begins to undo the dark sash of his garment.
A few annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly established with important church commissions? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a more intense, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 years when this account was documented.