A young lad screams as his skull is firmly gripped, a massive digit pressing into his face as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a single twist. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his other hand, prepared to slit the boy's throat. One definite aspect remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. There exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a protector could betray him so utterly.
The artist took a well-known scriptural tale and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen directly in front of the viewer
Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real face, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost dark pupils – features in several other works by the master. In each case, that highly emotional face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his black feathery appendages sinister, a naked child running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated nude figure, standing over overturned objects that comprise musical devices, a musical score, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic disorder is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can unleash.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted blind," penned Shakespeare, shortly prior to this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He gazes directly at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.
As the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious painter in a metropolis ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous times before and make it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring directly before you.
However there existed a different aspect to the artist, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were anything but holy. That could be the absolute first resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his red lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.
The adolescent wears a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but known through images, the master represented a famous female prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for purchase.
What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.
His initial works do offer overt erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might look to an additional early creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at you as he starts to untie the dark sash of his garment.
A few annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost established with important church commissions? This profane pagan god resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a more intense, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 annums when this story was documented.
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