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A young lad cries out as his skull is firmly gripped, a massive digit digging into his face as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his remaining hand, ready to slit the boy's throat. One certain element remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing piece displayed extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but also profound grief that a protector could betray him so utterly.

The artist took a familiar biblical tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in front of you

Standing before the painting, observers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate record of a young model, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost dark pupils – features in two other paintings by the master. In each instance, that richly expressive visage commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his dark feathery appendages sinister, a naked adolescent running riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, vividly lit unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a musical score, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love painted sightless," wrote the Bard, shortly before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been portrayed many occasions previously and render it so new, so raw and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring directly before the spectator.

However there existed another aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, only talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were anything but holy. That could be the very earliest hangs in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy room mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent container.

The adolescent sports a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic commerce in early modern art. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female courtesan, holding a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.

How are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the artist was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some art scholars unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.

His initial paintings do offer overt sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at you as he starts to untie the dark sash of his robe.

A few years following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost established with important church commissions? This unholy pagan deity revives the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

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