What exactly was the dark-feathered god of love? The secrets that masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist
A youthful boy cries out as his skull is forcefully held, a massive digit pressing into his face as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical account. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the metallic grey knife he grips in his remaining hand, ready to cut Isaac's throat. A certain aspect stands out – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed extraordinary expressive skill. Within exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
The artist took a well-known biblical story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors seemed to unfold right in view of the viewer
Viewing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a actual face, an accurate record of a young subject, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark eyes – features in several other works by the master. In each instance, that highly emotional visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his black plumed appendages sinister, a naked child running chaos in a affluent residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very real, vividly illuminated unclothed form, standing over overturned objects that include stringed instruments, a music score, metal armour and an architect's ruler. This pile of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy mess is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly before this work was created around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares directly at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master created his three portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous times before and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening immediately before the spectator.
Yet there was another aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he came in Rome in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the city, just talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the holy city's attention were anything but holy. That may be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's dismal room mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass vase.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but known through photographs, the master portrayed a famous female courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for sale.
What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a question that has split his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art historians improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.
His early paintings indeed offer explicit sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to another early work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.
A few years after Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with prestigious church projects? This unholy pagan god revives the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, uneasy way. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait 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] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.
The artist had been dead for about forty years when this story was recorded.
