🔗 Share this article

A youthful lad screams while his head is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his father's mighty hand holds him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a single twist. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to slit the boy's throat. One definite aspect remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary acting skill. Within exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

He took a familiar biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen right in view of the viewer

Standing before the artwork, observers identify this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost black eyes – appears in several additional works by the master. In each instance, that highly emotional face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with frequently agonizing longing, is portrayed as a very real, brightly illuminated nude figure, standing over toppled-over items that include stringed instruments, a music manuscript, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – except here, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Love painted sightless," wrote the Bard, just before this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he poses naked – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

As the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a city ignited by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many times before and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring directly before you.

However there existed another aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only skill and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the holy city's attention were anything but holy. That could be the very earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent container.

The adolescent wears a pink flower in his hair – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through images, the master represented a famous woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for purchase.

How are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the artist was not the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His early paintings indeed make explicit erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to another initial creation, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black sash of his robe.

A several annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing almost respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan god revives the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, uneasy way. Half a century afterwards, 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 youth or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

The painter had been deceased for about 40 annums when this account was documented.