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The young boy cries out as his skull is forcefully held, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural account. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his son, could snap his neck with a single turn. Yet Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his other palm, ready to slit Isaac's throat. One certain aspect remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable acting skill. There exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

The artist adopted a well-known biblical tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in view of the viewer

Standing in front of the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost dark pupils – appears in two additional works by the master. In every case, that richly emotional face commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his black feathery wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling overturned items that comprise stringed devices, a musical score, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the melancholic disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love depicted blind," penned the Bard, just before this work was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a city ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many times previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of you.

Yet there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, just talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were everything but devout. That may be the absolute earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass container.

The adolescent wears a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern painting. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but known through images, Caravaggio represented a famous woman prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for sale.

What are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain art historians unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His initial paintings indeed offer explicit erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, viewers might look to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he begins to undo the dark sash of his robe.

A few years after the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a more intense, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.

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