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The youthful boy cries out while his skull is firmly gripped, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his other palm, prepared to slit the boy's neck. A certain aspect remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary acting skill. There exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally deep grief that a protector could abandon him so completely.

He took a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to happen right in view of you

Standing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a real face, an accurate record of a young model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly black pupils – appears in two other paintings by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly expressive visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his dark plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed child running riot in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated unclothed form, straddling toppled-over items that comprise stringed instruments, a music manuscript, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted sightless," penned the Bard, just prior to this work was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.

As the Italian master created his three portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous times previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.

However there existed a different side to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, only talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's eye were everything but devout. That could be the very first resides in London's art museum. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass container.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through photographs, the master represented a renowned female prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.

How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial paintings do offer overt erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, observers might look to an additional early work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.

A several years following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost established with prestigious church commissions? This profane pagan deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his early works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A English traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

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