🔗 Share this article

A young lad screams while his skull is forcefully held, a massive digit digging into his face as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the throat. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. It seems as if the patriarch, instructed by God to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. However Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his remaining hand, ready to slit Isaac's throat. One certain aspect stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed remarkable acting ability. There exists not just dread, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but also profound grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.

The artist took a well-known biblical story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to happen right in view of the viewer

Viewing before the painting, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate record of a young model, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly black pupils – features in two other paintings by Caravaggio. In every case, that richly emotional face commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a well-to-do dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London museum, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often painful desire, is shown as a extremely real, vividly lit unclothed figure, standing over overturned items that include stringed devices, a music manuscript, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This pile of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except here, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Cupid depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, shortly before this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master created his three images of the same distinctive-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred painter in a city enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed numerous times previously and render it so new, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring directly in front of you.

Yet there was another side to the artist, apparent as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, just talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the holy city's attention were everything but devout. What may be the very first resides in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see the painter's gloomy room reflected in the murky liquid of the glass vase.

The adolescent wears a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but known through photographs, Caravaggio represented a renowned female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these botanical indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the painter was neither the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some art historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.

His initial paintings do make overt sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young creator, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to an additional early work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine gazes calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark sash of his robe.

A few years following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy pagan god resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British visitor 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 Cecco.

The artist had been dead for about 40 years when this story was recorded.