🔗 Share this article

The young boy cries out while his skull is firmly gripped, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary twist. Yet Abraham's chosen method involves the metallic grey blade he holds in his remaining hand, ready to cut Isaac's neck. One definite element stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed remarkable acting skill. There exists not only fear, shock and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.

The artist adopted a well-known biblical story and made it so fresh and raw that its horrors appeared to happen directly in view of the viewer

Viewing in front of the artwork, observers recognize this as a real face, an accurate record of a young model, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost black eyes – appears in several additional works by the master. In each case, that highly emotional face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his dark feathery wings sinister, a naked adolescent creating riot in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling overturned objects that include musical devices, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy mess is caused by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Love sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking kid in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been depicted many occasions previously and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening directly before you.

However there existed a different side to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, just skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were everything but holy. What may be the absolute first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his red lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.

The adolescent wears a pink blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.

What are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the artist was not the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His initial works do make explicit erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to another initial work, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.

A few annums following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with prestigious church commissions? This unholy pagan god resurrects the erotic provocations of his early works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.

The artist had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was recorded.