🔗 Share this article

A young lad cries out while his head is firmly gripped, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the throat. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet Abraham's preferred method involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his other hand, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. One definite element remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not just fear, shock and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

He adopted a familiar biblical tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen directly in front of the viewer

Standing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real face, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark eyes – features in two additional paintings by the master. In each case, that richly expressive visage commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his dark feathery wings demonic, a unclothed child running riot in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly lit nude figure, standing over overturned objects that include stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an architect's T-square. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the melancholic mess is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Love sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes straight at you. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the identical unusual-looking youth in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a city enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many times previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.

Yet there existed another aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, only skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's eye were everything but holy. That may be the absolute earliest hangs in London's National Gallery. A young man opens his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but known through images, the master portrayed a famous woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for sale.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the artist was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as some art historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His early works indeed offer overt sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he begins to undo the black sash of his garment.

A few years following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the erotic challenges of his early works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.

The artist had been dead for about forty years when this account was recorded.