What was the dark-feathered god of desire? What insights that masterwork uncovers about the rebellious genius

A youthful boy screams while his skull is firmly held, a large digit digging into his cheek as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the biblical account. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his other hand, prepared to slit the boy's throat. One definite element remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable expressive ability. There exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but additionally profound grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

The artist took a familiar scriptural tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen right in front of you

Viewing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate record of a young subject, because the identical boy – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost dark eyes – features in several additional paintings by the master. In every instance, that highly expressive visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his black feathery wings demonic, a naked child running chaos in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated nude form, standing over overturned objects that comprise musical devices, a musical score, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of items echoes, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love painted blind," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

As the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring directly before you.

Yet there was another aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early twenties with no teacher or patron in the urban center, just talent and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the sacred city's attention were anything but holy. That could be the absolute first hangs in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass container.

The adolescent sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but known through images, the master portrayed a renowned female prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex historical reality is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art scholars unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.

His early works indeed make overt erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to another initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at the spectator as he starts to undo the dark sash of his garment.

A several years following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing almost respectable with important church projects? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 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 painter had been deceased for about 40 years when this story was documented.