🔗 Share this article

The young lad cries out while his skull is firmly held, a large digit digging into his face as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented youth from the scriptural narrative. It seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. However the father's chosen method involves the metallic steel knife he grips in his remaining palm, ready to slit the boy's throat. One certain aspect stands out – whoever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary acting skill. There exists not just dread, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but also deep grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.

He adopted a well-known scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold directly in view of the viewer

Viewing in front of the artwork, observers recognize this as a real face, an accurate record of a young subject, because the identical boy – identifiable by his tousled hair and almost dark eyes – features in several other works by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly emotional face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his dark plumed wings demonic, a unclothed child creating riot in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel totally unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly lit nude form, straddling overturned objects that comprise stringed instruments, a music manuscript, plate armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just before this work was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many occasions before and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring directly before you.

Yet there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, just skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's attention were everything but holy. That could be the absolute first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A young man opens his red mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent container.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern painting. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but known through images, the master represented a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.

What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.

His early paintings do make overt erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, observers might turn to another early work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black sash of his garment.

A several years following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly established with important ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian deity revives the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British visitor viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

The artist had been dead for about 40 years when this story was documented.