🔗 Share this article

A youthful boy screams as his skull is forcefully held, a massive digit pressing into his face as his father's powerful palm holds him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical account. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen method involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his remaining hand, prepared to slit the boy's neck. One definite aspect remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this astonishing piece displayed extraordinary acting skill. There exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but also profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

He took a familiar scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen right in view of you

Standing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost dark pupils – features in two additional works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly emotional visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black feathery wings demonic, a unclothed child running chaos in a well-to-do residence.

Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, vividly lit nude form, standing over overturned items that comprise musical devices, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted blind," penned the Bard, just before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted many times previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.

However there was another aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only skill and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's eye were anything but devout. That could be the absolute first resides in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the murky liquid of the glass container.

The boy wears a pink blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex trade in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on film in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art historians improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.

His early paintings indeed offer overt sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark sash of his garment.

A several annums following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last becoming almost respectable with important church commissions? This profane non-Christian deity revives the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a more powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

The painter had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was recorded.