What was the black-winged god of love? What secrets that masterwork uncovers about the rebellious artist
The young lad cries out while his skull is forcefully gripped, a large thumb digging into his face as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single twist. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the silvery steel knife he holds in his remaining palm, ready to slit Isaac's throat. A definite aspect stands out – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. There exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a protector could betray him so completely.
The artist adopted a familiar biblical tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in front of you
Viewing before the painting, observers identify this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost dark eyes – features in several additional works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly expressive visage commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black plumed wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over items that include stringed instruments, a music score, metal armour and an architect's T-square. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Love sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a city ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted numerous times previously and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring directly before the spectator.
Yet there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, just talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were everything but devout. What could be the very earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent vase.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio represented a renowned female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for sale.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a question that has split his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His early paintings indeed make overt sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young creator, identified with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, observers might turn to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at you as he begins to undo the dark sash of his garment.
A several annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy pagan god resurrects the erotic challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty years when this account was documented.
