🔗 Share this article

A young boy cries out as his head is forcefully held, a large digit digging into his cheek as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac 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 the Divine to kill his son, could break his neck with a single turn. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic grey knife he holds in his other hand, prepared to cut the boy's neck. A certain aspect remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.

The artist took a well-known scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold right in view of you

Viewing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the same youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly dark eyes – features in two additional works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive face dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery appendages sinister, a naked child creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a extremely tangible, vividly lit unclothed figure, straddling overturned items that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Cupid painted blind," penned the Bard, just prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen confidence as he poses naked – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master painted his multiple images of the same unusual-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many times before and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately in front of you.

Yet there existed a different side to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no teacher or patron in the city, just skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the sacred metropolis's attention were anything but holy. That may be the absolute first resides in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his red mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: observers can see the painter's dismal room reflected in the murky waters of the transparent vase.

The adolescent wears a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through images, the master represented a famous woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for sale.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex past reality is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some art historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.

His early works indeed make overt sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might look to another early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black sash of his garment.

A several annums following Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly established with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy non-Christian god revives the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

The painter had been dead for about 40 annums when this story was recorded.