🔗 Share this article

A young lad screams as his skull is forcefully held, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand holds him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the biblical account. It seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a single twist. However the father's preferred method involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his remaining palm, ready to cut Isaac's neck. One definite aspect stands out – whomever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed remarkable acting ability. Within exists not just dread, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but also deep sorrow that a protector could betray him so utterly.

The artist took a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold right in front of you

Viewing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a real face, an precise record of a young subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled locks and nearly black eyes – features in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each case, that richly expressive visage commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on the city's streets, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a very real, vividly lit nude form, straddling toppled-over items that comprise musical devices, a musical score, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Love depicted blind," penned the Bard, just prior to this work was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master created his multiple images of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred painter in a city enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many occasions before and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring directly before you.

However there was another aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's attention were anything but devout. That could be the very earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.

The boy wears a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female prostitute, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for sale.

How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the artist was not the queer hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as some artistic scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.

His early works do make overt sexual implications, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to another initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at you as he starts to untie the black sash of his garment.

A few annums after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan deity resurrects the erotic challenges of his early works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

The painter had been dead for about 40 years when this story was recorded.