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The youthful boy screams while his head is forcefully gripped, a massive digit pressing into his face as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. However the father's chosen approach involves the silvery grey blade he holds in his other palm, ready to slit the boy's throat. A certain aspect remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary acting skill. Within exists not just dread, shock and begging in his darkened gaze but also deep grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

The artist took a well-known scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold right in view of the viewer

Standing before the painting, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost dark pupils – appears in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive visage dominates 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 the city's alleys, his dark feathery wings sinister, a naked adolescent creating riot in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a London gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a very real, vividly lit nude figure, straddling toppled-over items that comprise musical instruments, a music manuscript, plate armour and an architect's T-square. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – save here, the melancholic mess is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Love depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold confidence as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed sacred painter in a city ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be happening directly before you.

However there existed another side to the artist, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only skill and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were anything but devout. That may be the absolute earliest resides in London's art museum. A young man parts his red lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's dismal room mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent vase.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned female prostitute, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the painter was neither the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some artistic scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His initial works do make overt erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he starts to undo the black ribbon of his robe.

A several annums following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the sexual challenges of his early works but in a increasingly intense, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British visitor saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

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