What exactly was Caravaggio's dark-feathered god of love? The insights this masterwork uncovers about the rebellious genius
The youthful boy screams as his head is forcefully held, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the neck. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the biblical account. It appears as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary turn. However the father's preferred method involves the silvery grey blade he holds in his other palm, ready to cut the boy's neck. One definite element stands out – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed remarkable acting ability. There exists not just dread, shock and begging in his darkened eyes but also deep grief that a protector could betray him so utterly.
He took a familiar biblical story and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold right in front of you
Standing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the same youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly black eyes – features in several other paintings by Caravaggio. In each case, that richly emotional visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his dark feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed child creating riot in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful longing, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly illuminated unclothed form, straddling toppled-over objects that include stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen 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 images of the same distinctive-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted many times previously and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring directly in front of you.
However there was another aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, only skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred metropolis's attention were anything but devout. That could be the absolute first resides in the UK's art museum. A youth parts his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.
The adolescent sports a pink blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.
How are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.
His early paintings do offer explicit sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young creator, identified with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.
A several annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly established with important church commissions? This unholy pagan god revives the erotic challenges of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.
The artist had been dead for about forty annums when this account was recorded.
