Who was the black-winged deity of desire? What insights this masterwork uncovers about the rebellious genius
The young boy screams while his head is forcefully held, a large thumb digging into his face as his parent's mighty hand holds him by the throat. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, evoking unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical account. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his son, could snap his neck with a single turn. Yet Abraham's preferred method involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his other palm, ready to cut the boy's neck. A definite element remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable acting skill. There exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.
He took a well-known scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to happen directly in front of the viewer
Viewing in front of the artwork, observers recognize this as a real face, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost dark pupils – features in two additional paintings by the master. In every case, that richly emotional visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on the city's alleys, his dark feathery wings demonic, a naked child creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.
Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel totally unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly illuminated unclothed figure, standing over toppled-over items that comprise musical instruments, a musical score, metal armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.
"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly before this work was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares straight at you. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.
When the Italian master painted his multiple images of the same distinctive-looking kid in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred painter in a city enflamed by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed many times before and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening directly in front of the spectator.
However there existed another side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, only skill and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the holy city's attention were everything but holy. That may be the very first resides in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal room reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.
The boy sports a pink blossom in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.
What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His initial works do offer overt sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to another early work, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at you as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his robe.
A few annums after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian god revives the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face 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 40 years when this account was documented.
