🔗 Share this article

The young lad screams as his skull is forcefully held, a large thumb digging into his face as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the biblical narrative. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a single twist. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery steel knife he holds in his other hand, ready to cut the boy's neck. One certain aspect remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.

The artist took a well-known biblical tale and made it so fresh and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold right in front of the viewer

Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a young model, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly black eyes – features in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each case, that richly emotional visage commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his black plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed child creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with often painful longing, is shown as a very tangible, brightly lit unclothed form, standing over toppled-over items that include stringed instruments, a music score, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – save here, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Cupid painted blind," penned Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-looking kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a city enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous times before and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of you.

Yet there existed another side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, only talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but devout. What could be the absolute earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A young man opens his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.

The adolescent sports a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned woman courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for purchase.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex historical reality is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some art scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial works indeed make explicit sexual implications, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark sash of his robe.

A several years following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly established with prestigious church commissions? This profane pagan god revives the erotic challenges of his early works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A English visitor saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.

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