🔗 Share this article

The youthful boy cries out while his skull is forcefully held, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. However the father's preferred method involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his remaining hand, ready to slit the boy's throat. One certain aspect remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable acting skill. Within exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his shadowed gaze but additionally profound grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

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

Viewing in front of the painting, observers recognize this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost black eyes – features in several additional paintings by the master. In each case, that highly expressive visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his dark feathery appendages demonic, a naked child creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly lit unclothed form, straddling overturned objects that comprise stringed devices, a musical score, metal armor and an architect's ruler. This pile of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just prior to this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he poses naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many occasions previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring directly before the spectator.

Yet there existed a different aspect to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, only talent and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy city's attention were anything but holy. What may be the very first hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his red lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.

The adolescent sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female prostitute, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for sale.

What are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain art historians unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His initial paintings indeed make explicit sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might look to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.

A several annums after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost respectable with important ecclesiastical projects? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

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