🔗 Share this article

A young lad screams as his head is firmly held, a massive digit pressing into his face as his parent's mighty hand holds him by the throat. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical account. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single twist. However Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his other palm, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. One definite aspect remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable expressive skill. There exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

The artist took a familiar biblical tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen directly in view of you

Standing before the painting, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an accurate record of a adolescent subject, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled hair and almost dark pupils – features in several other paintings by the master. In each instance, that highly emotional visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's alleys, his black plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a extremely real, vividly lit unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over items that include stringed instruments, a music manuscript, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love painted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this work was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master created his three images of the identical unusual-looking kid in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted many times previously and make it so new, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.

Yet there existed a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early twenties with no teacher or patron in the city, only skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy city's attention were everything but devout. That may be the very earliest hangs in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his red mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see the painter's dismal room reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass container.

The boy sports a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned woman courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.

How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as some art scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.

His early works indeed offer explicit erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might look to another initial work, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black sash of his robe.

A few years after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan god resurrects the sexual challenges of his early works but in a increasingly intense, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A English traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

The painter had been dead for about forty years when this story was recorded.