🔗 Share this article

The youthful boy cries out as his head is firmly held, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. Yet Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his remaining hand, ready to slit Isaac's throat. One certain element stands out – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary acting skill. There exists not just dread, shock and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also deep grief that a protector could betray him so completely.

He adopted a well-known scriptural story and made it so fresh and visceral that its terrors appeared to happen right in front of you

Standing before the painting, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly black eyes – appears in several additional paintings by the master. In every case, that highly expressive visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed child creating riot in a well-to-do dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over items that include stringed devices, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, shortly before this work was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the identical unusual-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many occasions previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening directly in front of you.

Yet there was another aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy city's attention were anything but devout. What could be the very first hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass container.

The adolescent sports a pink blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for sale.

How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His initial paintings do offer explicit sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young creator, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, observers might turn to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at you as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his robe.

A few years following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This profane pagan god revives the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling way. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance 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 40 years when this account was documented.