🔗 Share this article

The youthful lad screams as his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb digging into his face as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. However Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his other hand, prepared to cut the boy's neck. A certain aspect stands out – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary acting skill. There exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

He took a familiar scriptural story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in view of you

Viewing before the painting, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost black pupils – features in two other works by the master. In each instance, that highly emotional face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes 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 wings sinister, a naked adolescent running riot in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly illuminated unclothed form, standing over overturned objects that comprise musical devices, a music score, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Love looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted blind," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this work was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares straight at you. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master created his three images of the same distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious painter in a city enflamed by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions before and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring directly before the spectator.

However there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, just talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the holy city's eye were everything but holy. What may be the very earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's dismal room reflected in the murky liquid of the glass vase.

The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but documented through images, the master represented a famous woman courtesan, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for sale.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain art scholars unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.

His initial paintings do offer overt erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, aligned with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.

A several years following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane pagan god revives the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

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