Who exactly was Caravaggio's black-winged deity of love? The secrets this masterpiece reveals about the rebellious artist
A youthful lad cries out while his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive digit digging into his face as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single turn. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his remaining palm, prepared to slit the boy's neck. One certain element stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. There exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also profound grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
The artist adopted a well-known biblical story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen directly in front of you
Viewing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost black eyes – appears in two additional works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly expressive face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness acquired on the city's alleys, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a naked adolescent running chaos in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly illuminated nude form, standing over overturned items that include musical instruments, a musical score, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear strewn across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – except in this case, the melancholic disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Cupid painted sightless," penned the Bard, just prior to this work was created around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That face – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master painted his three images of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been depicted many occasions before and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.
However there existed a different side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, just talent and boldness. The majority of the works with which he caught the sacred city's eye were everything but holy. What may be the very first hangs in London's art museum. A youth opens his red mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but known through images, Caravaggio represented a famous female courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.
What are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His initial works do offer explicit sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to an additional early creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to undo the black sash of his robe.
A few years after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last becoming almost established with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling way. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A English traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 years when this account was recorded.
