🔗 Share this article

A young lad cries out while his head is firmly held, a massive thumb digging into his face as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a single twist. However Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic grey knife he holds in his other palm, ready to cut Isaac's neck. A definite aspect remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable expressive skill. Within exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

He adopted a familiar biblical tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold right in front of the viewer

Viewing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate record of a young model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly black eyes – features in two additional works by Caravaggio. In each case, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his black plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a extremely real, brightly lit unclothed figure, standing over toppled-over items that include stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction equipment scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy mess is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Love depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly prior to this work was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the same unusual-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a city enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed many times previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening directly before the spectator.

However there existed a different side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's attention were anything but devout. What may be the absolute earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: observers can see the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.

The boy sports a rose-colored flower in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.

What are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past reality is that the artist was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial works do offer overt sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to another early creation, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he starts to undo the dark sash of his garment.

A several years following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A British traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

The painter had been deceased for about 40 years when this story was documented.