🔗 Share this article

A young boy cries out as his head is forcefully held, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic grey knife he grips in his remaining palm, ready to cut Isaac's throat. One definite element stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but also deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.

He took a well-known scriptural story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen directly in front of the viewer

Viewing before the painting, observers recognize this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a young subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost black pupils – features in two additional works by the master. In every instance, that highly emotional face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a very real, brightly illuminated unclothed form, standing over toppled-over objects that include stringed devices, a music manuscript, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Cupid depicted sightless," penned the Bard, just prior to this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple portrayals of the same distinctive-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions previously and make it so fresh, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be happening immediately before you.

Yet there existed a different side to the artist, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial twenties with no teacher or patron in the urban center, just talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were everything but devout. That could be the absolute earliest hangs in London's art museum. A young man opens his red lips in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent container.

The adolescent wears a pink blossom in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a famous woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex historical reality is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.

His initial works indeed make explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young creator, aligned with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might look to an additional initial work, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he begins to untie the black sash of his robe.

A few annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian god revives the erotic challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

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