Who was the black-winged god of desire? What secrets this masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist
A young boy cries out as his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the suffering child from the biblical account. The painting appears as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his remaining palm, ready to cut the boy's throat. One definite element remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated remarkable acting ability. There exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but also deep sorrow that a protector could betray him so utterly.
He took a well-known scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold right in front of you
Standing in front of the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the same youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost dark eyes – appears in several other works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly expressive face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his black plumed wings sinister, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a affluent residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, vividly lit unclothed form, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise musical devices, a musical score, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just before this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master painted his multiple images of the same distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred painter in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions previously and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately before you.
However there was a different aspect to the artist, evident 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 city, just talent and boldness. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were anything but devout. What may be the absolute first hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth parts his red mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's gloomy room reflected in the murky waters of the glass container.
The boy wears a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.
How are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the artist was not the queer hero that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as some art scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His initial paintings do offer explicit sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to another initial work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.
A few annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with prestigious church projects? This unholy pagan deity revives the sexual challenges of his early works but in a more intense, unsettling way. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about 40 years when this account was recorded.
