Who was Caravaggio's dark-feathered deity of love? What secrets this masterwork reveals about the rogue artist
The youthful lad cries out as his skull is firmly held, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical account. It seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a single twist. However Abraham's chosen method involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his remaining hand, ready to slit the boy's throat. One definite element stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable acting ability. There exists not just fear, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but also deep grief that a protector could betray him so completely.
He took a familiar scriptural tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold directly in front of the viewer
Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a young model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost black pupils – appears in several other works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly emotional face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black feathery wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often painful longing, is shown as a very real, vividly lit nude form, straddling toppled-over objects that include stringed devices, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and construction equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except 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 mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, just before this work was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master created his three portrayals of the same unusual-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous times before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.
Yet there existed a different aspect to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter 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 sacred metropolis's eye were everything but holy. That may be the absolute first hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his crimson lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent container.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned woman prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for sale.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex past reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some art scholars unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His initial works indeed offer explicit sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young artist, identified with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to another early work, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black sash of his robe.
A several years following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly established with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy non-Christian deity revives the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a more intense, uneasy manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 annums when this story was documented.
