Who was the black-winged deity of love? What secrets this masterpiece uncovers about the rogue genius
The young lad screams as his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his father's powerful palm holds him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical account. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary twist. However Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his remaining hand, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. A definite aspect remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable acting ability. Within exists not just fear, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.
The artist took a well-known biblical tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold right in view of you
Standing before the painting, observers identify this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled locks and nearly black pupils – features in two other paintings by the master. In every case, that highly expressive visage commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his dark feathery wings sinister, a unclothed child running riot in a affluent residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently painful longing, is portrayed as a very real, brightly illuminated nude figure, straddling toppled-over items that include musical devices, a musical score, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except here, the melancholic mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes directly at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the same unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by religious revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed numerous times previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring directly before you.
Yet there existed another side to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, just talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's attention were everything but devout. That may be the absolute first hangs in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his red mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: observers can see the painter's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass container.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned female courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for purchase.
What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on film in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain art scholars unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His initial works indeed offer explicit sexual implications, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, viewers might look to an additional initial work, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.
A few years after the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with prestigious church projects? This profane pagan deity revives the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A English visitor saw 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 name of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about 40 years when this story was recorded.
