Who was Caravaggio's dark-feathered deity of desire? The insights this masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
The youthful lad screams as his head is forcefully gripped, a large thumb digging into his face as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking unease through the artist's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical account. The painting appears as if Abraham, instructed by God to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his remaining hand, ready to slit the boy's throat. One definite element stands out – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally profound grief that a protector could abandon him so completely.
The artist took a familiar biblical story and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen right in front of you
Standing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a actual countenance, an accurate record of a young subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost black eyes – features in two additional works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly emotional visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed wings sinister, a unclothed child running riot in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Viewers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated nude figure, straddling overturned items that include musical devices, a musical score, plate armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in the German master's print Melancholy – except here, the melancholic disorder is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Cupid painted blind," wrote the Bard, just prior to this work was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a city ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been depicted many times before and render it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the terror seemed to be happening directly in front of the spectator.
Yet there existed another side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, just talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy city's eye were everything but holy. That may be the absolute first resides in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his red mouth in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent container.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.
What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has divided his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as some art scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.
His initial works do offer explicit erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might look to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares coolly at you as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his robe.
A few annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost established with important church projects? This profane non-Christian god revives the sexual provocations of his early works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A English visitor viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.
The artist had been deceased for about 40 years when this story was documented.
