🔗 Share this article

The youthful boy cries out while his head is forcefully held, a large digit digging into his cheek as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a single twist. However the father's chosen approach involves the silvery grey blade he holds in his other palm, ready to slit Isaac's neck. A definite aspect remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary acting ability. There exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed gaze but also profound grief that a protector could betray him so utterly.

The artist took a well-known biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to happen right in view of the viewer

Viewing in front of the artwork, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the same youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly dark eyes – features in several additional paintings by the master. In each instance, that richly emotional face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his dark feathery appendages demonic, a naked child creating riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly lit nude figure, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a music manuscript, metal armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save here, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, just before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with bold assurance as he struts naked – 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 the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a city enflamed by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been depicted many occasions before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately in front of you.

However there was another aspect to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, just skill and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's attention were anything but holy. What could be the very earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.

The adolescent wears a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio represented a famous female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.

His early paintings do make explicit sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to another early work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black sash of his garment.

A few annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his early works but in a more intense, uneasy manner. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

The artist had been dead for about forty annums when this story was recorded.