🔗 Share this article

A youthful boy cries out while his skull is firmly gripped, a large digit digging into his cheek as his father's powerful palm holds him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if the patriarch, instructed by God to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single turn. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his remaining hand, ready to slit the boy's neck. One certain element remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his shadowed eyes but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.

He took a familiar biblical story and made it so fresh and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen right in front of you

Standing before the painting, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise record of a young subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost dark pupils – features in two additional works by Caravaggio. In every case, that richly expressive visage commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black plumed wings sinister, a unclothed child creating chaos in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a very real, vividly illuminated nude form, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a musical score, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love depicted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just before this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three portrayals of the same unusual-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a metropolis ignited by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many occasions before and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.

However there existed another side to the artist, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only skill and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's attention were everything but devout. What may be the absolute earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass container.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but known through photographs, the master represented a famous female courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: intimacy for sale.

What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic scholars unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.

His initial works do offer overt sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might look to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he starts to undo the black sash of his robe.

A few years 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 almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian deity revives the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A English traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

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