🔗 Share this article

The young lad cries out while his head is firmly held, a large thumb digging into his face as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic steel knife he grips in his other hand, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. A certain element remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not just dread, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but additionally profound grief that a protector could betray him so utterly.

He adopted a well-known scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen directly in front of the viewer

Viewing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost dark eyes – features in two additional works by the master. In every case, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his black plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a very tangible, vividly lit nude form, standing over overturned items that include musical devices, a musical score, metal armour and an architect's T-square. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the geometric and architectural gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the melancholic disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love painted blind," wrote the Bard, just before this work was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious artist in a metropolis ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous times before and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening immediately before you.

However there existed a different aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, just skill and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's attention were anything but devout. That could be the very first resides in London's art museum. A youth opens his red mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the transparent container.

The boy wears a pink flower in his hair – a emblem of the sex commerce in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for sale.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the artist was not the homosexual icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as some art scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His early paintings do make explicit sexual implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to another initial work, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes calmly at you as he begins to undo the black sash of his garment.

A few years following Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan god revives the erotic provocations of his early works but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

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