🔗 Share this article

The youthful boy cries out as his skull is firmly held, a massive thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a single turn. However Abraham's preferred method involves the silvery grey blade he grips in his other palm, ready to slit the boy's throat. A certain element remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable expressive skill. Within exists not just fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally profound grief that a protector could betray him so completely.

He took a well-known biblical story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen directly in view of the viewer

Standing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost black eyes – features in several other works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly emotional visage commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness learned on the city's alleys, his black plumed appendages demonic, a naked child creating riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a very tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed form, straddling overturned objects that include musical instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except here, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares directly at you. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the same unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many times before and render it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring directly in front of you.

However there existed another side to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, just skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's eye were anything but devout. That could be the absolute earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent container.

The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.

How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.

His initial works do offer overt sexual suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might look to another initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his robe.

A several annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject 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 artist had been dead for about 40 annums when this account was documented.