🔗 Share this article

A youthful boy screams as his skull is forcefully held, a large digit digging into his cheek as his father's mighty hand holds him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. However Abraham's chosen method involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his other hand, prepared to cut Isaac's throat. One definite aspect remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed remarkable expressive ability. There exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed gaze but also profound grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

The artist adopted a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to happen directly in front of you

Viewing before the artwork, viewers recognize this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost dark pupils – appears in several additional paintings by the master. In every instance, that richly emotional face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on the city's streets, his dark plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly lit unclothed form, standing over overturned objects that include stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three images of the same unusual-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed sacred artist in a city enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted many occasions before and render it so new, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately before you.

However there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no teacher or patron in the urban center, just talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred city's eye were anything but holy. That may be the very first resides in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass container.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for sale.

How are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art historians improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His initial paintings do make explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to another initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at you as he begins to undo the black sash of his robe.

A few years after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing almost established with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian god revives the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

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