🔗 Share this article

The youthful lad screams while his skull is forcefully gripped, a large digit digging into his cheek as his father's powerful hand holds him by the throat. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. It seems as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his other hand, prepared to slit the boy's throat. A certain aspect remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not only dread, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but also deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

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

Viewing in front of the painting, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and nearly black eyes – appears in several other paintings by the master. In every instance, that highly expressive visage commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his black plumed wings demonic, a naked adolescent creating riot in a well-to-do residence.

Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely real, vividly lit unclothed form, standing over overturned objects that include musical devices, a music score, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except here, the gloomy mess is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love depicted sightless," penned the Bard, just prior to this work was created around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking kid in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed sacred artist in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted many occasions before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be happening directly in front of you.

Yet there was another side to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he came in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, only skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred city's eye were anything but holy. That may be the very earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass container.

The boy wears a pink flower in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but known through photographs, the master portrayed a famous female prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is clear: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on screen in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some art scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His early paintings indeed offer explicit erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark sash of his garment.

A several years after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost established with important ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a more powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A British visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

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