What was the black-winged deity of desire? What insights that masterpiece reveals about the rogue genius
The young lad cries out as his skull is firmly gripped, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his father's powerful hand holds him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his son, could snap his neck with a single twist. However the father's chosen approach involves the metallic steel blade he grips in his remaining hand, ready to cut Isaac's neck. One certain aspect stands out – whomever posed as Isaac for this astonishing piece displayed extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but also profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.
He took a familiar biblical tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen right in view of the viewer
Standing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost black pupils – appears in two other paintings by the master. In every case, that highly expressive visage commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his dark plumed wings sinister, a naked adolescent creating riot in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is shown as a very real, vividly lit nude figure, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a musical score, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except here, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he poses naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master created his three portrayals of the same unusual-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred painter in a city ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted many times before and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately before you.
However there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he came in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were anything but holy. What may be the very earliest resides in London's art museum. A youth parts his red lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's dismal room mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass vase.
The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but known through images, the master portrayed a famous woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is clear: intimacy for sale.
How are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some art scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His early works do offer explicit sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, identified with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might look to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black sash of his robe.
A few years after the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the erotic challenges of his early works but in a increasingly intense, uneasy manner. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty years when this account was recorded.
