Who exactly was the black-winged deity of desire? What secrets this masterwork uncovers about the rogue artist
A youthful lad screams while his head is firmly gripped, a large thumb digging into his face as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the neck. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single turn. However the father's preferred approach involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his remaining palm, ready to cut Isaac's neck. A certain aspect remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece demonstrated remarkable expressive skill. There exists not just fear, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but also profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
The artist took a familiar biblical story and made it so fresh and raw that its terrors appeared to happen right in front of the viewer
Standing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled locks and nearly black pupils – appears in several other works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly expressive visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness acquired on the city's streets, his black feathery wings demonic, a naked adolescent creating riot in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly illuminated unclothed form, standing over overturned items that include musical instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares straight at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master painted his three images of the identical unusual-looking kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a city enflamed by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a biblical story that had been depicted numerous occasions before and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.
Yet there was a different aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only skill and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the sacred metropolis's eye were anything but holy. That may be the very first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his red lips in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.
The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned woman prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for sale.
How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as some art historians improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.
His initial paintings do make explicit sexual implications, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might look to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at you as he begins to untie the dark sash of his robe.
A few annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan god revives the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was recorded.
