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The boy howls as his head is held down, a huge thumb pressing into his cheek as his father’s mighty hand holds him by the neck. This is The Sacrifice of Isaac and I am looking at it in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, feeling distressed by how Caravaggio has so chillingly rendered the face of this suffering child from the biblical tale. It looks as if Abraham, who has been told by God to kill his son, could break his neck with just one twist. Yet Abraham’s preferred method is with the silvery grey knife he holds in his other hand, ready to slit Isaac’s throat. One thing’s for certain – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work was a great actor. There is not just dread, shock and pleading in his darkened eyes but also grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.
Standing in front of the painting, I know this is a real face, an accurate record of a young model, because the same boy – recognisable by his tousled hair and almost black eyes – appears in two other paintings by Caravaggio. In each, that richly expressive face steals the show. In John the Baptist, he looks mischievously out of the shadows while cuddling a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome’s streets, his black feathery wings demonic, a naked kid running riot in a well-to-do house.
Victorious Cupid, which goes on show this week at the Wallace Collection in London, is the most embarrassing masterpiece ever painted. You feel totally thrown looking at it. Cupid, the god of love whose arrows fill people with often painful desire, is depicted as a very real, brightly lit nude, straddling toppled-over objects that include stringed instruments, a music manuscript, plate armour and an architect’s T-square. This pile of stuff resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I – except here, the melancholic mess is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind,” wrote Shakespeare, just before this was painted in around 1601. But Caravaggio’s Cupid is not blind. He looks right at you. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three images of the same funny-looking kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a city enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac shows why he was in demand to decorate churches: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted many times before and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be happening right in front of you.
Yet there was another side to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, just skill and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he caught the holy city’s eye were anything but holy. What may be the very earliest hangs in London’s National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: you can see Caravaggio’s dismal chamber reflected in the murky waters of the glass vase.
The boy wears a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the sex trade in Renaissance art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding flowers and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female courtesan, Fillide Melandroni, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for sale.
What are we to make of Caravaggio’s sensual depictions of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as some art historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.
His early paintings do make explicit sexual suggestions, or even offers. It’s as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young painter, identified with Rome’s sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, I turn to another early work, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares coolly at you as he starts to undo the black ribbon of his robe.
A few years after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with prestigious church commissions? This unholy pagan god resurrects the sexual provocations of his early works but in a more intense, uneasy way. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio’s lover. The British traveller Richard Symonds saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has “the body & face of [Caravaggio’s] owne boy or servant that laid with him”. The name of this boy was Cecco.
The painter had been dead for about 40 years when Symonds heard this. Similar tales had circulated about Italian artists in the past. It was claimed the sculptor Donatello was obsessively in love with an apprentice, which makes sense if you have ever seen his nude bronze David. But was the story just a way of rationalising the suggestiveness of Donatello’s statue? Giorgio Vasari, the painter and historian, even gossips that Leonardo da Vinci “took for his assistant the Milanese Salaì, who was most comely in grace and beauty, having fine locks curling in ringlets, in which Leonardo greatly delighted”.
Was Caravaggio’s Cecco a fable? No – for, as we have seen, the boy in this painting was the painter’s regular model in the early 1600s, which fits with him being on hand in the artist’s home, as pupil and servant. In all three paintings, he has incredible presence and individuality – performing, you might almost say, for the camera, but in reality for his master. And in two of the paintings, he is stark naked.
The most intimate, though, is John the Baptist. As John embraces a ram with curly horns, he sits on a red blanket cushioned with white pillows and comfy fur, his body raked by light that catches his legs and shoulders while his penis is in the shadows, though still visible. It’s meant to be a wilderness but feels more like a bedroom, one that he looks out from relaxed, not in the least embarrassed. Meanwhile, the ram gazes at him, dotes on him. Could this lovestruck face be Caravaggio portraying himself as the horned, devilish beast?
That would certainly fit with how Caravaggio’s enemy, the artist Giovanni Baglione, saw him. In 1602, this much less talented rival painted Sacred and Profane Love, a riposte to Victorious Cupid, setting himself up as the Christian antithesis to Caravaggio’s satanic excesses. Baglione depicts the angel of sacred love stepping between a red-fleshed devil with Caravaggio’s features and his “catamite”. The angelic saviour looks lovingly down on the youth while the Caravaggio-faced demon rages at being denied the object of his lust. It’s a vicious parody of Victorious Cupid that makes a dangerous accusation: Caravaggio is a sodomite and his Cupid is his victim.
Caravaggio hit back. He and his friend, the artist Orazio Gentileschi, posted rude poems about Baglione in the streets of Rome, accusing him – justifiably – of being a lousy painter. Baglione in turn accused them of libel and took them to court. In his testimony, Gentileschi mentioned that Caravaggio had recently visited his house to borrow a pair of strap-on wings, presumably the ones Victorious Cupid wears.
Caravaggio lost the case and was dogged by more charges for violent crimes, until he had to flee Rome after killing a man in 1606. But his untamed genius inspired an artistic movement across the continent. His radical, brutal style, stark use of light, and tough everyday stories caught the imaginations of young artists across Europe, from Orazio’s daughter Artemisia Gentileschi to Georges de la Tour, Diego Velázquez and the Caravaggisti of Utrecht. And, of course, there was Cecco del Caravaggio, as he became known.
Whatever else Caravaggio did to Cecco – we will obviously never know – he trained him as a painter. Symonds refers to the model for Cupid as an artist in his own right: “Checco del Caravaggio tis calld among the painters”. Cecco’s Interior With a Young Man Holding a Recorder, in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, incorporates a skilful array of objects, including fruit and musical instruments, very much in Caaravaggio’s mode. Even more Caravaggesque is a vessel containing water in which we see distorted reflections, echoing Boy Bitten By a Lizard.
Do we need to know about the private lives of artists? Vasari thought so. For some experts on baroque art, the idea that Caravaggio went around Catholic Rome flaunting his sinful life is unbelievable – yet his paintings do exactly that. What we can’t do is call him gay or queer in any comfortable sense. The past is another country and they desired differently there. The latest serious historical studies of sex relations between males in early modern Italy show that, despite the proscriptions of church and court, there was a lot of it going on.
The historian Michael Rocke has found that, during a 70-year period of the 15th century, 13,000 men in Florence – a city with a population of 40,000 – were accused of sodomy. And those who were convicted usually got off with a fine, often “offending” again. But the convention was that mature men desired younger males: Leonardo with Salaì, Caravaggio with Cecco. As Caravaggio’s English contemporary Christopher Marlowe is reported to have said: “They that love not Tobacco and Boys are fools.” This strange, disturbing country of the past is what Caravaggio shoves in your face.
Even in that world, Caravaggio was close to the edge and it is there that his art thrives, on a sword-edge of danger. He exhibits his “boy” Cecco in ways that openly defied the church and was called out for this by Baglione. Caravaggio is like Satan, says Baglione’s riposte to his Cupid: he is sin personified.
Four hundred years on, we might make more sense of the incredible painting that is coming to the Wallace Collection if we simply use that old word, sin. Caravaggio’s paintings shudder and provoke with sin – the supposedly sinful pleasures of sweet grapes, red wine and sex. He came to see himself as a great sinner. And he was: a murderer who spent his last years on the run, trying to atone with his art.
His quest for redemption, by painting altarpieces in southern Italy, plunged him into self-scrutinising reveries. He painted his own face on to the severed head of Goliath, held up by the boy David. It is a haunting, haunted face: Caravaggio imagines himself punished even after death, his eyelids slumped, his mouth open, as his head is held up by the young avenger. For his sins.
