🔗 Share this article

A youthful boy screams as his skull is firmly gripped, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. However Abraham's chosen method involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his remaining hand, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. A definite element stands out – whoever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated remarkable expressive skill. There exists not just dread, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.

He adopted a well-known biblical tale and made it so fresh and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold right in view of you

Viewing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a real face, an precise depiction of a adolescent subject, because the same youth – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost black eyes – features in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly expressive visage commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his black feathery wings demonic, a naked child running riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London museum, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a very real, vividly lit nude figure, straddling overturned items that comprise stringed devices, a musical score, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment scattered across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love painted blind," penned the Bard, shortly before this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the same distinctive-looking kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous times previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be happening directly before the spectator.

However there was another side to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, just talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's attention were everything but devout. That may be the absolute first hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his crimson lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.

The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through photographs, the master represented a famous woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for purchase.

What are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some art scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His early works indeed offer explicit sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes calmly at you as he starts to undo the dark sash of his garment.

A few annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian god revives the erotic provocations of his early works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

The painter had been deceased for about forty years when this account was documented.