🔗 Share this article

A youthful lad cries out while his head is forcefully held, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if Abraham, instructed by God to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a single twist. Yet Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic grey knife he grips in his other hand, prepared to cut Isaac's throat. A certain aspect stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed extraordinary acting skill. There exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

He took a well-known scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in front of you

Viewing in front of the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a young subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost dark pupils – features in two additional works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery wings sinister, a unclothed child running riot in a well-to-do dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly lit nude figure, straddling overturned items that comprise stringed instruments, a musical score, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save here, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love painted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.

As the Italian master painted his three images of the same unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and render it so new, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately before the spectator.

Yet there was another aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only skill and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's eye were everything but holy. That may be the very first resides in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent container.

The boy wears a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through images, the master represented a renowned female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.

How are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the artist was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His early paintings do make overt erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black sash of his robe.

A few years after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing almost respectable with prestigious church commissions? This profane pagan god revives the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a more intense, uneasy way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

The painter had been dead for about forty annums when this story was documented.