What was Caravaggio's dark-feathered god of love? The insights this masterwork uncovers about the rogue artist
A young lad cries out while his skull is firmly held, a large digit digging into his cheek as his parent's powerful palm holds him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the biblical account. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. Yet Abraham's chosen method involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his other palm, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. A certain element stands out – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing piece displayed remarkable acting ability. There exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.
He took a familiar scriptural story and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to happen right in view of the viewer
Standing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a young model, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly black pupils – appears in several other paintings by the master. In every instance, that highly emotional visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a naked adolescent running riot in a affluent dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very real, brightly illuminated unclothed form, straddling overturned items that include musical devices, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted sightless," wrote the Bard, just before this work was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a biblical 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.
Yet there was another side to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, only skill and boldness. The majority of the works 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 youth opens his red lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.
The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through images, the master represented a famous woman courtesan, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the artist was not the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some artistic historians improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His initial works do make overt erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young creator, identified with the city's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to another early creation, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his robe.
A several years following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly established with important church commissions? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic challenges of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter'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 assistant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty years when this story was recorded.
