🔗 Share this article

A young boy cries out while his skull is firmly held, a massive digit digging into his face as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical account. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the silvery steel knife he holds in his other palm, prepared to slit the boy's neck. A certain element remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but also profound sorrow that a protector could betray him so utterly.

He adopted a familiar biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and raw that its horrors seemed to happen directly in front of you

Viewing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a real face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost black pupils – appears in two other works by the master. In each instance, that richly emotional face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his dark feathery wings sinister, a unclothed child running chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a London gallery, constitutes 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 agonizing longing, is portrayed as a very tangible, brightly lit unclothed figure, standing over overturned objects that comprise stringed instruments, a music score, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Cupid painted blind," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three images of the same unusual-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many occasions previously and make it so fresh, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be happening immediately before the spectator.

Yet there existed another side to the artist, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were anything but holy. That could be the very earliest resides in London's art museum. A youth parts his red mouth in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: observers can see the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass container.

The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned female courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for sale.

How are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the artist was not the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain art historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His early works do offer explicit erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black sash of his garment.

A several annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy pagan deity revives the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

The painter had been dead for about forty years when this story was documented.