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What exactly was Caravaggio's black-winged god of love? The secrets this masterpiece reveals about the rebellious artist
A youthful boy screams as his head is forcefully held, a large digit pressing into his face as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical account. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his spinal column with a single twist. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic grey knife he holds in his other hand, prepared to cut Isaac's throat. A certain element stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable acting ability. There exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but also profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.
The artist adopted a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold right in view of you
Standing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a young model, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled locks and nearly dark eyes – features in several additional works by the master. In each case, that highly expressive face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a well-to-do residence.
Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often painful desire, is shown as a very real, vividly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling overturned objects that include musical instruments, a music manuscript, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love depicted blind," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master painted his three images of the same distinctive-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed many times previously and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring directly before you.
However there was a different aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the holy city's attention were anything but devout. That could be the absolute first resides in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent container.
The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but known through photographs, the master portrayed a famous female prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for purchase.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some art scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.
His initial paintings indeed make overt erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young artist, aligned with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at you as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.
A few annums after Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost established with important church commissions? This unholy pagan deity revives the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a more intense, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.
The artist had been deceased for about forty years when this account was recorded.
Margaret Houston
A dedicated writer and theologian passionate about sharing faith-based insights and fostering community connections.
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