What exactly was the black-winged god of love? The insights this masterwork uncovers about the rogue artist
The young lad screams as his head is forcefully gripped, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural account. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a single twist. However Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his other palm, ready to cut the boy's neck. One definite element stands out – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed remarkable expressive skill. There exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but also profound grief that a protector could betray him so completely.
He adopted a well-known scriptural story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen directly in front of you
Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and nearly black pupils – appears in two other works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his black feathery wings demonic, a naked adolescent running chaos in a affluent residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a very tangible, brightly lit unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over objects that include stringed instruments, a music score, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – save here, the gloomy mess is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love painted blind," penned Shakespeare, just before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the same distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a city enflamed by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions before and render it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be happening directly in front of the spectator.
However there was a different side to the artist, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, only skill and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were everything but devout. That could be the absolute first resides in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his red lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see the painter's dismal room reflected in the murky liquid of the glass container.
The boy wears a pink blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern painting. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned female courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for purchase.
What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent 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 artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as some art historians improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His early works do offer explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares coolly at you as he begins to undo the black sash of his robe.
A few annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron the nobleman, when he was at last becoming almost respectable with prestigious church projects? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty years when this story was recorded.
