🔗 Share this article

The young boy screams while his head is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful palm holds him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. It seems as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his other hand, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. One certain element stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally deep grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.

He adopted a familiar biblical story and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to happen directly in view of you

Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled locks and nearly dark eyes – features in several other paintings by the master. In each instance, that highly emotional face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his dark plumed wings demonic, a naked adolescent creating riot in a well-to-do dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly lit unclothed figure, standing over toppled-over objects that include stringed devices, a music manuscript, plate armour and an architect's T-square. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save here, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Love looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Love depicted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this work was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes straight at you. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.

As the Italian master painted his three images of the identical distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted many occasions before and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately before the spectator.

However there was another aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but devout. What may be the absolute first resides in London's art museum. A youth parts his red lips in a scream of pain: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio represented a famous woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for purchase.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the painter was not the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial works indeed offer overt sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to an additional early work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at you as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his robe.

A few annums following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with important church commissions? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

The artist had been dead for about 40 annums when this account was recorded.