What was the black-winged god of desire? The secrets this masterwork uncovers about the rogue artist
The youthful boy screams while his head is firmly gripped, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful palm holds him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a single turn. Yet Abraham's chosen method involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his other palm, prepared to slit the boy's throat. A certain aspect stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. There exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but also deep grief that a protector could betray him so completely.
The artist took a well-known scriptural tale and transformed it so fresh and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold right in view of the viewer
Standing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled locks and nearly dark pupils – appears in several other paintings by the master. In each instance, that richly expressive face dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his dark feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed child creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London museum, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a very tangible, vividly lit unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise stringed instruments, a music manuscript, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted blind," wrote the Bard, just before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many occasions before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately before the spectator.
Yet there existed a different aspect to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, just skill and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's attention were everything but devout. That may be the absolute earliest resides in London's art museum. A young man opens his red mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the transparent container.
The adolescent sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: intimacy for purchase.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of boys – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a question that has split his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.
His early works do offer overt erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to another early work, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.
A several years following Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost established with prestigious church commissions? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his early works but in a increasingly intense, uneasy way. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about 40 annums when this story was recorded.
