🔗 Share this article

The youthful boy cries out while his skull is firmly gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his neck with a single turn. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery grey blade he grips in his remaining hand, ready to slit the boy's neck. One certain element stands out – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but also profound grief that a protector could betray him so completely.

He adopted a well-known biblical story and made it so fresh and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in front of you

Viewing before the painting, observers identify this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and almost black pupils – appears in several additional works by Caravaggio. In every case, that richly emotional face dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his dark feathery appendages sinister, a naked child running riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a London museum, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly lit unclothed figure, standing over overturned objects that include stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Love depicted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly prior to this work was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He gazes straight at you. That face – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three portrayals of the same unusual-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many times before and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring directly before you.

Yet there was a different side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, just talent and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the sacred city's eye were anything but devout. That could be the absolute first hangs in London's art museum. A young man opens his crimson mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the transparent container.

The adolescent wears a pink blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but known through photographs, Caravaggio represented a famous woman prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is clear: intimacy for sale.

How are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some artistic scholars unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.

His initial works indeed make explicit sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with the city's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares calmly at you as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.

A few years following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane pagan god resurrects the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

The painter had been deceased for about 40 years when this story was documented.