🔗 Share this article

The young boy cries out as his skull is forcefully gripped, a large digit digging into his cheek as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the biblical account. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to kill his son, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. However Abraham's chosen method involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his remaining hand, prepared to slit the boy's neck. One certain element remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary acting ability. There exists not only fear, shock and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

The artist took a familiar biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold right in view of you

Viewing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a real countenance, an precise record of a young subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly black pupils – appears in two additional paintings by the master. In each instance, that richly emotional visage commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his dark plumed wings sinister, a naked adolescent creating riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise stringed instruments, a music manuscript, metal armour and an architect's ruler. This pile of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's engraving Melancholy – except here, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just before this work was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. 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 terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master created his three images of the same unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious painter in a city ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring directly before you.

However there existed another aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, just talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but devout. What may be the very first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the murky waters of the transparent vase.

The adolescent sports a pink blossom in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through images, the master portrayed a renowned female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters ever since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain art scholars unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His early works do make overt erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to another initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his robe.

A few years following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with important church projects? This profane pagan deity revives the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

The painter had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was recorded.