Who exactly was the dark-feathered deity of love? The insights this masterwork uncovers about the rogue genius
The young lad cries out as his head is firmly gripped, a large thumb pressing into his face as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a single twist. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery grey blade he holds in his remaining hand, ready to cut the boy's throat. One definite aspect stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary 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 well-known biblical tale and made it so fresh and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in front of you
Standing before the painting, observers recognize this as a real face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost dark pupils – features in several additional works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly emotional face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his dark feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed child creating riot in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a London museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a very real, brightly lit nude form, standing over overturned objects that comprise stringed instruments, a musical score, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted blind," wrote Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master painted his three images of the same distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a metropolis ignited by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted many times before and render it so fresh, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.
However there was another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, only skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's eye were everything but holy. What could be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his red mouth in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.
The boy wears a pink blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through images, the master represented a famous woman prostitute, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for purchase.
What are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex past reality is that the artist was not the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some art scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.
His early works do offer overt erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to another early work, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at you as he starts to untie the dark sash of his robe.
A few annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with important church commissions? This profane pagan deity revives the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about 40 annums when this account was documented.
