🔗 Share this article

A young lad cries out while his skull is forcefully held, a large digit pressing into his face as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his other hand, prepared to slit the boy's throat. One definite element remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable acting ability. Within exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.

The artist took a familiar biblical story and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in front of the viewer

Viewing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate record of a young subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly black eyes – features in several other works by Caravaggio. In each case, that richly emotional face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his black plumed wings sinister, a unclothed child running riot in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with frequently painful desire, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly lit nude form, standing over toppled-over items that include stringed instruments, a music score, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted blind," wrote the Bard, just before this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares directly at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he poses naked – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the same distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed many times before and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.

However there was another side to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, just talent and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's eye were everything but holy. What may be the absolute first hangs in London's art museum. A young man opens his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's gloomy room reflected in the murky liquid of the glass container.

The boy wears a pink blossom in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for sale.

How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic historians improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial works indeed offer explicit erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional early work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at you as he begins to untie the dark sash of his garment.

A several years after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost established with important church commissions? This profane non-Christian god revives the sexual provocations of his early works but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A English visitor saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

The artist had been deceased for about forty years when this story was documented.