Who was Caravaggio's dark-feathered deity of love? The insights this masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist
A young lad screams while his skull is firmly gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his father's powerful palm holds him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural account. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his remaining palm, ready to slit Isaac's throat. A definite element stands out – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not only fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally deep grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
He took a familiar biblical story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in view of the viewer
Viewing before the painting, observers recognize this as a real face, an accurate record of a adolescent subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and nearly black pupils – appears in several other works by the master. In every case, that highly emotional face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness learned on the city's alleys, his black plumed wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a affluent residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely real, brightly lit nude figure, straddling overturned objects that include musical devices, a musical score, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Love painted sightless," wrote the Bard, just prior to this work was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at you. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the same unusual-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been depicted many times before and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately before you.
Yet there was another side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, just talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's eye were everything but devout. That may be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his red mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the murky waters of the glass vase.
The boy sports a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio represented a renowned woman prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the artist was not the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His initial paintings indeed offer explicit erotic implications, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young artist, identified with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to another early work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at you as he starts to undo the dark sash of his robe.
A several years following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical projects? This unholy pagan deity revives the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 annums when this story was documented.
