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A youthful boy screams while his head is firmly held, a massive thumb digging into his face as his father's powerful hand holds him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a solitary twist. However the father's preferred approach involves the metallic grey knife he holds in his remaining hand, ready to slit Isaac's throat. One certain element remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable acting ability. There exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also deep grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

He took a well-known biblical story and made it so fresh and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold right in front of you

Standing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a young model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly black eyes – appears in several additional works by the master. In every case, that highly emotional face dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed child creating chaos in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a London gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Viewers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly lit unclothed form, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a musical score, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This pile of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – save here, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this work was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the identical unusual-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated religious painter in a city enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted many occasions before and make it so fresh, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be happening immediately in front of the spectator.

However there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, only talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the holy city's attention were everything but holy. That could be the very earliest resides in London's art museum. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through images, the master portrayed a famous woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.

How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic scholars unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.

His initial works do make explicit erotic suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to another initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark sash of his garment.

A few annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming nearly established with important church projects? This unholy pagan deity revives the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English visitor viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

The artist had been deceased for about 40 years when this account was recorded.