What exactly was the black-winged god of love? What secrets that masterpiece uncovers about the rebellious artist
The young boy screams while his skull is firmly gripped, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural account. It seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen method involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his other palm, prepared to slit Isaac's throat. One definite element stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed extraordinary acting skill. Within exists not just dread, shock and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so utterly.
The artist took a familiar scriptural tale and made it so fresh and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in front of you
Viewing before the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real face, an accurate record of a young model, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly black eyes – appears in several other works by the master. In each case, that richly expressive visage commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his black plumed appendages sinister, a naked child creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Viewers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a very real, vividly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling overturned items that include stringed devices, a musical score, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Cupid depicted blind," penned Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three images of the same unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious artist in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous times before and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be happening immediately before you.
Yet there was another aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only skill and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the holy metropolis's eye were anything but holy. That may be the absolute earliest hangs in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see the painter's dismal room reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.
The boy sports a pink blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through images, the master represented a famous woman courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.
How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on film in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as some artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.
His initial works indeed offer explicit sexual implications, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might look to another initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at you as he begins to untie the dark sash of his garment.
A few years following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with important church projects? This profane pagan deity resurrects the erotic challenges of his early works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A British visitor saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty years when this account was documented.
