🔗 Share this article

A youthful boy cries out as his skull is forcefully gripped, a large thumb digging into his face as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the neck. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through the artist's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary turn. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his remaining hand, ready to slit Isaac's neck. A definite element stands out – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed extraordinary acting skill. There exists not just fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

The artist adopted a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to happen right in view of you

Standing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate record of a young subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly dark pupils – features in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each case, that highly emotional face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a very tangible, vividly lit unclothed form, standing over overturned items that include musical instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, shortly before this work was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master created his three images of the same distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious artist in a city ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many times before and render it so fresh, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be happening immediately before you.

Yet there was another side to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, just skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the sacred city's eye were everything but holy. What could be the very earliest hangs in London's art museum. A youth opens his red lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent container.

The boy wears a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female prostitute, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.

His initial paintings indeed make overt sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, identified with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to another initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his robe.

A few years following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly established with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian deity revives the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.

The painter had been deceased for about forty years when this account was recorded.