🔗 Share this article

A young lad screams while his skull is firmly gripped, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical account. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. However the father's preferred method involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his remaining palm, ready to slit the boy's neck. One certain aspect stands out – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

The artist adopted a familiar scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold right in front of you

Viewing before the painting, observers identify this as a actual face, an accurate record of a young model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost dark eyes – appears in several additional paintings by the master. In each instance, that highly emotional visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on the city's streets, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a naked adolescent running chaos in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London museum, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly lit unclothed figure, standing over overturned items that comprise stringed devices, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an architect's T-square. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except here, the melancholic mess is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love painted blind," penned the Bard, just prior to this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous times before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring directly in front of you.

Yet there existed a different side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, just talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but holy. That may be the absolute first resides in London's art museum. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.

The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous woman prostitute, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His initial works do make explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless 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 creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.

A several annums after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

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