Who exactly was the black-winged god of desire? The insights this masterpiece uncovers about the rogue artist
A young boy cries out as his head is forcefully gripped, a massive digit pressing into his face as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical account. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. However the father's chosen method involves the metallic grey knife he holds in his remaining hand, ready to slit the boy's throat. A definite aspect stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary expressive skill. Within exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
He adopted a well-known biblical tale and made it so fresh and raw that its horrors seemed to happen right in view of the viewer
Standing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a young model, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly black eyes – appears in two additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly expressive face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his dark plumed wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a very real, brightly lit nude form, standing over toppled-over items that include musical instruments, a music manuscript, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three portrayals of the same unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous times previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening directly before you.
However there existed a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial twenties with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, just talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but holy. That may be the absolute earliest resides in London's art museum. A youth parts his red mouth in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.
The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous woman courtesan, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.
What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His early paintings do make explicit sexual suggestions, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might look to another initial creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black sash of his garment.
A few annums following Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing almost respectable with important church projects? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.
The artist had been dead for about 40 years when this account was recorded.
