🔗 Share this article

A youthful lad cries out while his skull is forcefully gripped, a large digit pressing into his face as his father's powerful hand holds him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented youth from the scriptural account. It appears as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his son, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his other palm, prepared to cut Isaac's throat. One certain aspect remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not just fear, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but also deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

The artist took a well-known scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to happen directly in front of you

Standing before the artwork, observers identify this as a real countenance, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark pupils – appears in several additional paintings by the master. In every instance, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his black plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a very real, brightly illuminated nude form, straddling toppled-over items that comprise stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Love sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Love painted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly before this work was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares straight at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master created his multiple images of the same distinctive-looking youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a biblical story that had been portrayed many times previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening directly in front of the spectator.

However there was a different aspect to the artist, evident 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 city, just talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the holy city's eye were anything but devout. What may be the very first hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his red lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.

The boy sports a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned female courtesan, holding a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.

What are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain art scholars unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.

His initial works do make overt erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with the city's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to another initial work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black sash of his robe.

A few annums following Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with important church projects? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

The artist had been dead for about forty annums when this account was documented.