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The youthful lad cries out as his head is firmly gripped, a massive thumb digging into his face as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a single turn. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his remaining palm, ready to cut Isaac's neck. One certain aspect stands out – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his darkened 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 terrors appeared to happen directly in front of you

Standing before the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost dark eyes – appears in several additional works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly illuminated nude form, standing over toppled-over items that comprise musical devices, a music manuscript, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save here, the melancholic mess is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Love sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Love painted blind," penned Shakespeare, just prior to this work was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, looking with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions previously and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening directly in front of the spectator.

However there existed a different aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, just talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy city's eye were everything but holy. That may be the very first resides in London's National Gallery. A young man opens his crimson lips in a scream of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass vase.

The adolescent sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through photographs, the master represented a famous female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.

How are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the painter was neither the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain art scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His initial paintings indeed make overt erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might look to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the dark sash of his garment.

A several annums after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with important church projects? This profane non-Christian god revives the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

The painter had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was documented.