Who was the dark-feathered god of love? The secrets that masterwork reveals about the rebellious artist
The young boy screams as his head is firmly held, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the biblical account. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could break his neck with a single turn. Yet Abraham's chosen method involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his other palm, ready to slit Isaac's neck. A definite aspect remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. There exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his darkened eyes but also profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.
The artist adopted a well-known biblical tale and made it so fresh and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in view of you
Standing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a young model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark eyes – appears in several other works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly expressive face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark feathery appendages demonic, a naked adolescent running riot in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a extremely tangible, vividly lit nude figure, straddling toppled-over items that comprise musical instruments, a musical score, plate armour and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melancholy – save here, the melancholic mess is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares straight at you. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred painter in a city enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many times previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening immediately in front of the spectator.
However there was another side to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only talent and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy city's eye were everything but holy. What could be the very earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.
The boy wears a pink blossom in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but known through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.
How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His initial works indeed offer overt erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to another initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark sash of his garment.
A few years following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost respectable with prestigious church commissions? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.
The artist had been dead for about 40 annums when this story was documented.