🔗 Share this article

A young lad screams while his skull is forcefully gripped, a large thumb pressing into his face as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his other palm, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. A certain aspect remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.

The artist adopted a familiar scriptural story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen right in view of the viewer

Viewing before the painting, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark eyes – features in several additional works by Caravaggio. In each case, that highly emotional visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his black feathery wings sinister, a naked child creating riot in a affluent dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly lit unclothed figure, standing over overturned objects that comprise musical instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Cupid depicted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three images of the same distinctive-looking kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a metropolis ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many occasions before and make it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring directly before the spectator.

Yet there existed another side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly 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 urban center, only skill and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's eye were everything but holy. What could be the very earliest hangs in London's art museum. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.

The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through photographs, the master represented a famous woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.

How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex past reality is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.

His early paintings do offer overt erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might look to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at you as he begins to undo the dark sash of his robe.

A few annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly established with important church projects? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a more intense, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A British traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

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