What was the dark-feathered deity of desire? What insights that masterpiece reveals about the rebellious genius
A young lad cries out as his head is firmly gripped, a massive digit pressing into his face as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical account. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his son, could snap his neck with a single twist. However the father's preferred approach involves the metallic steel blade he grips in his remaining hand, prepared to slit the boy's neck. One definite aspect stands out – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing piece displayed extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not only dread, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally profound grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
The artist took a familiar scriptural story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen directly in front of you
Standing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark pupils – features in several additional works by the master. In every case, that highly expressive face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his black feathery appendages sinister, a naked child creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly lit unclothed figure, standing over overturned items that include musical devices, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except in this case, the melancholic mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Cupid painted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just before this work was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master created his multiple images of the identical unusual-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a city enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring directly in front of you.
However there existed a different side to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the city, only talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were anything but holy. That may be the absolute first hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his red mouth in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern Caravaggio's dismal chamber reflected in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but known through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has split his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His early works indeed make explicit sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to another initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at you as he begins to untie the dark sash of his robe.
A several annums after the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last becoming almost established with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy non-Christian god revives the erotic challenges of his initial works but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been deceased for about 40 years when this account was recorded.
