🔗 Share this article

A youthful boy cries out while his head is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the biblical account. It appears as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his other palm, ready to cut the boy's neck. A certain element stands out – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary acting ability. There exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a protector could betray him so utterly.

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

Standing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a real face, an precise depiction of a young model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark pupils – appears in two additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each case, that richly expressive visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his dark plumed appendages demonic, a naked adolescent running riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often painful longing, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly lit unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over objects that include stringed instruments, a music manuscript, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this work was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master painted his multiple images of the same unusual-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many times previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately before you.

Yet there was another side to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial twenties with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only talent and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were everything but devout. That may be the very earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a yell of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.

The adolescent wears a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in early modern painting. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned female courtesan, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral signifiers is clear: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – 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 complicated past truth is that the painter was neither the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain art historians improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His early paintings indeed make overt erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young creator, aligned with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black sash of his garment.

A several annums after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with important church projects? This unholy non-Christian god revives the sexual provocations of his early works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

The artist had been dead for about 40 annums when this account was recorded.