Who was the dark-feathered deity of love? The secrets this masterpiece uncovers about the rogue artist
A youthful boy screams while his skull is firmly gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through the artist's chilling rendition of the suffering youth from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. However the father's chosen method involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his other hand, ready to slit Isaac's neck. One definite element remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not just fear, shock and begging in his darkened eyes but also deep grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.
The artist adopted a familiar biblical story and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen right in view of you
Viewing in front of the painting, observers identify this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark eyes – features in several other works by the master. In each case, that richly emotional visage commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a naked child running chaos in a affluent dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a London gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a extremely real, brightly lit unclothed form, standing over overturned items that comprise musical devices, a music score, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except in this case, the melancholic mess is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, shortly before this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes straight at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with bold confidence as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three portrayals of the same distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed many times before and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.
Yet there was a different aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the holy city's eye were anything but devout. What may be the absolute first resides 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 attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: observers can see the painter's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his hair – a emblem of the sex trade in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through photographs, the master represented a famous woman prostitute, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for sale.
How are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the painter was neither the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on film in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some artistic scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His initial paintings do offer overt sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might look to another early work, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black ribbon of his garment.
A few years after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost established with important church commissions? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the erotic challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty years when this account was recorded.
