What exactly was the dark-feathered deity of desire? What secrets this masterpiece reveals about the rebellious artist
The young boy screams while his head is forcefully gripped, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if the patriarch, instructed by God to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary twist. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic steel knife he grips in his remaining hand, ready to cut the boy's neck. A certain aspect remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing piece displayed extraordinary acting skill. There exists not only fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but also deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
He took a familiar biblical story and transformed it so fresh and raw that its terrors appeared to happen directly in view of you
Viewing in front of the painting, observers identify this as a real face, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark pupils – appears in several other paintings by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly expressive visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his black feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed child creating riot in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly lit unclothed form, standing over toppled-over objects that include stringed devices, a musical score, metal armour and an architect's T-square. This heap of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy mess is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, just before this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the same unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a city enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many occasions previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror appeared to be happening immediately before the spectator.
Yet there was another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were everything but holy. What may be the absolute first hangs in London's art museum. A young man parts his red lips in a scream of agony: while reaching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent container.
The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio represented a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for sale.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on film in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.
His early paintings indeed offer overt sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, identified with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might look to an additional initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his garment.
A few annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with important church projects? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about forty years when this story was documented.
