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The youthful lad cries out while his head is forcefully held, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by God to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen method involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his other hand, prepared to slit the boy's neck. A certain element remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not just fear, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally deep grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.

The artist took a familiar scriptural story and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen directly in front of the viewer

Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost dark eyes – appears in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his black plumed appendages demonic, a naked child running chaos in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely real, vividly illuminated unclothed form, standing over overturned objects that include stringed devices, a music manuscript, metal armor and an architect's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Love depicted blind," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.

As the Italian master created his three images of the identical unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions before and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening directly before you.

However there was another aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's attention were anything but holy. That could be the very first resides in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see the painter's gloomy room mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass vase.

The boy wears a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as some artistic scholars unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His initial works do make explicit erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, identified with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to an additional initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black sash of his robe.

A few annums after the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost established with prestigious church projects? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

The artist had been deceased for about 40 years when this story was documented.