What exactly was Caravaggio's dark-feathered deity of desire? What insights this masterwork reveals about the rogue artist
The youthful boy screams while his head is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary turn. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery grey blade he grips in his remaining palm, ready to slit the boy's throat. A certain aspect stands out – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated remarkable acting skill. There exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also profound grief that a protector could betray him so utterly.
The artist took a familiar biblical tale and made it so fresh and raw that its horrors appeared to happen directly in front of you
Standing in front of the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the same youth – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost dark eyes – features in two other paintings by the master. In each case, that richly expressive visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark feathery wings sinister, a unclothed child creating riot in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a London gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over items that comprise stringed instruments, a music score, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save in this case, the melancholic mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love painted blind," penned the Bard, just prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen confidence as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three portrayals of the same unusual-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many times previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror appeared to be happening directly in front of the spectator.
Yet there was a different side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only talent and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but holy. What may be the very earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A young man opens his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.
The adolescent wears a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in early modern art. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain art historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His early paintings do offer explicit erotic implications, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young artist, aligned with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to another early work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at you as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.
A few annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with prestigious church projects? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a more intense, uneasy manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been deceased for about forty annums when this story was documented.
