Who exactly was the black-winged god of desire? What insights that masterpiece reveals about the rebellious genius
A young lad screams as his head is firmly held, a massive thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the tormented youth from the biblical account. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his other hand, ready to slit the boy's throat. One certain aspect stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not just dread, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a protector could betray him so utterly.
He took a familiar biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in view of the viewer
Standing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a real face, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled hair and almost black pupils – appears in two other works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly emotional face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his dark feathery wings demonic, a naked adolescent creating riot in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly lit unclothed figure, standing over toppled-over items that include stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted sightless," wrote the Bard, just prior to this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master created his three images of the identical unusual-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a city ignited by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been depicted many occasions previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.
Yet there was a different side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy city's eye were anything but devout. What may be the very first resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy room mirrored in the murky waters of the glass vase.
The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but known through images, the master portrayed a famous woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for sale.
What are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the painter was neither the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain art scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.
His early works do make explicit sexual implications, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young artist, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might look to another early creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black sash of his robe.
A several years after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with important church commissions? This unholy pagan god revives the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.
The artist had been deceased for about 40 years when this account was documented.
