Who was the black-winged deity of love? The insights this masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
A youthful lad screams as his head is firmly held, a massive thumb digging into his face as his father's powerful hand holds him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the tormented youth from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a single turn. However the father's chosen method involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his remaining hand, ready to slit the boy's neck. One definite aspect remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary acting skill. There exists not just fear, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally profound grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
He took a well-known biblical tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its terrors appeared to happen right in view of you
Standing before the painting, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark eyes – features in two other paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly emotional face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his black plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed child creating riot in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a extremely real, vividly lit nude figure, standing over toppled-over items that comprise musical instruments, a music score, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – except in this case, the melancholic mess is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Love painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares straight at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the same unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a city ignited by religious revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical story that had been depicted many occasions before and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring directly before you.
However there was another aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, just skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were anything but devout. That may be the very earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his red mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the murky waters of the transparent vase.
The boy sports a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern art. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain art historians unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.
His initial works indeed make explicit sexual implications, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, observers might look to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at you as he starts to undo the dark sash of his robe.
A few annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with prestigious church projects? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A English visitor viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about forty years when this account was recorded.
