🔗 Share this article

The young boy screams while his skull is forcefully held, a large digit pressing into his face as his parent's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his remaining palm, ready to cut the boy's throat. A definite element remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated remarkable acting skill. There exists not just fear, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.

He adopted a well-known scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to happen directly in view of the viewer

Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and nearly dark pupils – appears in several additional paintings by the master. In every instance, that richly expressive face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed wings sinister, a naked child running riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly lit unclothed figure, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted sightless," penned the Bard, just before this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master created his multiple images of the same distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a city enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror appeared to be happening directly in front of you.

However there was another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial twenties with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were anything but holy. That may be the very earliest resides in London's art museum. A youth opens his red lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see the painter's gloomy room reflected in the murky waters of the glass vase.

The adolescent wears a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a famous female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.

How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical reality is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as some art historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.

His initial works indeed make explicit sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young creator, aligned with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he begins to undo the dark sash of his garment.

A few years following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan god revives the sexual provocations of his early works but in a more intense, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British visitor viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

The artist had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was documented.