🔗 Share this article

A young boy screams while his skull is forcefully held, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented youth from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could break his neck with a solitary turn. However the father's preferred method involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his other hand, ready to cut the boy's neck. A definite aspect remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but also profound grief that a protector could betray him so utterly.

He adopted a well-known scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen right in front of you

Standing in front of the painting, observers identify this as a real countenance, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost black pupils – appears in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly expressive visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark plumed wings demonic, a naked adolescent running chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a very real, brightly lit nude form, standing over toppled-over objects that include stringed devices, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of items echoes, deliberately, the geometric and architectural gear strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – except here, the gloomy mess is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just prior to this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master created his three portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been depicted many occasions previously and make it so new, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be happening immediately in front of you.

Yet there existed a different side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no mentor or patron in the city, just skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy city's attention were anything but devout. That could be the absolute earliest resides in London's art museum. A youth parts his red mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.

The boy sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through photographs, the master represented a renowned female prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for purchase.

What are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His early paintings do offer explicit erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful artist, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to another early work, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark sash of his garment.

A few years after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with important church commissions? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic challenges of his early works but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

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