🔗 Share this article

A youthful boy cries out while his head is firmly gripped, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. However the father's preferred method involves the metallic grey knife he grips in his remaining hand, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. One certain aspect remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed remarkable expressive skill. Within exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his darkened eyes but also deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.

He took a familiar biblical story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen directly in front of the viewer

Viewing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost dark pupils – appears in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly emotional visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness learned on the city's alleys, his dark plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a well-to-do residence.

Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over items that include musical instruments, a musical score, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except here, the melancholic mess is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly before this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with bold confidence as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master painted his three images of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been portrayed many occasions before and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening immediately before the spectator.

Yet there existed a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, just skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were anything but devout. That could be the very earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while reaching out his filthy 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 transparent vase.

The adolescent sports a pink blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but known through images, the master represented a famous female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is clear: intimacy for sale.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as some artistic historians improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His early paintings do make explicit erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to an additional early creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the black sash of his robe.

A several annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector the nobleman, when he was at last becoming almost respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

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