Who was the black-winged god of love? The secrets this masterwork uncovers about the rogue artist
The young lad screams as his head is forcefully held, a massive thumb digging into his face as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a single twist. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his remaining palm, ready to cut Isaac's throat. A certain aspect remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable acting ability. Within exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
He adopted a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors seemed to unfold right in front of you
Standing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a young subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly black pupils – appears in several additional works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly emotional visage commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his black feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly illuminated unclothed form, standing over overturned objects that include stringed devices, a music score, metal armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save in this case, the melancholic mess is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.
"Love looks not with the vision, 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 god is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with bold confidence as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master created his three portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a city ignited by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous times before and make it so fresh, so raw and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of you.
Yet there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only skill and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's eye were everything but devout. That could be the very first resides in the UK's National Gallery. A young man opens his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent container.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but known through images, the master portrayed a famous woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.
What are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His early works indeed offer overt sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he starts to untie the black sash of his garment.
A few years following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with prestigious church commissions? This profane non-Christian deity revives the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a more intense, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.
The artist had been dead for about 40 years when this account was documented.
