🔗 Share this article

The youthful boy screams as his skull is forcefully held, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his father's powerful palm holds him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering child from the biblical account. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single twist. However the father's preferred approach involves the silvery grey blade he grips in his other hand, prepared to slit the boy's throat. A definite element remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing piece displayed extraordinary acting skill. There exists not just dread, shock and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.

The artist adopted a well-known scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in front of the viewer

Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a young subject, because the same youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly black eyes – features in two additional works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly emotional face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his dark feathery wings demonic, a unclothed child running chaos in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful desire, is portrayed as a very real, brightly illuminated unclothed form, straddling toppled-over items that include musical devices, a musical score, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – except here, the melancholic mess is caused by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted blind," wrote the Bard, just before this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the same distinctive-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a city enflamed by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous times before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring directly before you.

However there was another side to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, just skill and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the holy city's eye were anything but holy. What could be the absolute first resides in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his red lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent container.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master represented a famous woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some art scholars unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.

His initial paintings do make overt sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with the city's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at you as he starts to untie the black sash of his robe.

A few years after Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly established with important church projects? This unholy non-Christian deity revives the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, uneasy way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

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