🔗 Share this article

A young lad cries out while his head is firmly held, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the biblical account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could break his neck with a single turn. However the father's chosen approach involves the metallic grey blade he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. One certain element remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated remarkable acting ability. Within exists not only fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but also deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

The artist took a familiar biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in view of you

Standing before the artwork, observers identify this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the same youth – recognizable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark pupils – features in two additional works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive visage commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black feathery wings sinister, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a very real, vividly illuminated unclothed form, standing over overturned objects that include musical instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy mess is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master painted his three images of the identical unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a city enflamed by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately in front of you.

Yet there existed a different side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only skill and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the holy city's eye were everything but holy. That may be the absolute first resides in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his red mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: observers can see the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.

The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through images, the master represented a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for sale.

How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past reality is that the artist was not the homosexual hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.

His early works indeed make explicit sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might look to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his garment.

A several annums after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly established with important church commissions? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his early works but in a more powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

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