🔗 Share this article

The young lad screams as his skull is firmly held, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the tormented youth from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. However Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic grey knife he grips in his other palm, prepared to cut Isaac's throat. One certain aspect stands out – whomever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing piece displayed remarkable acting ability. There exists not only fear, shock and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally deep grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

The artist adopted a familiar scriptural tale and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen right in front of the viewer

Viewing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a real face, an accurate record of a adolescent subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost black pupils – appears in several additional works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly emotional visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his dark plumed wings demonic, a unclothed child creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often painful desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, standing over toppled-over items that comprise musical devices, a music manuscript, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – save here, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love depicted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master painted his three images of the identical unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated religious painter in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many times before and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening directly before you.

Yet there was another side to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he came in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, just skill and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred metropolis's attention were anything but holy. What could be the absolute earliest resides in London's art museum. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's dismal room mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent vase.

The boy sports a pink flower in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through images, the master portrayed a renowned woman courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.

How are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has split his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain art historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His initial paintings indeed offer explicit sexual implications, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his garment.

A several years following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with prestigious church projects? This profane non-Christian god revives the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a more intense, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A English traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.

The painter had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was recorded.