🔗 Share this article

A youthful boy cries out while his head is firmly gripped, a large digit digging into his face as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a single twist. Yet the father's preferred method involves the metallic steel knife he grips in his other hand, prepared to cut the boy's throat. A certain element remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable acting ability. Within exists not just dread, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

The artist adopted a familiar scriptural tale and transformed it so fresh and raw that its terrors seemed to happen right in view of you

Standing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an precise record of a young subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost dark eyes – features in two additional works by the master. In each instance, that richly emotional visage commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness acquired on the city's alleys, his black plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed form, standing over toppled-over items that include musical devices, a music manuscript, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save here, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love painted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master created his three portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious painter in a city enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous times previously and make it so fresh, so raw and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.

However there existed a different side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, just talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were anything but holy. What may be the absolute first hangs in London's art museum. A young man parts his red lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal chamber reflected in the murky waters of the glass container.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain art historians improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.

His early paintings indeed make overt erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to another initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he begins to undo the dark sash of his garment.

A several annums following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost established with important ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

The painter had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was documented.