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A young lad cries out while his head is firmly held, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen method involves the metallic grey knife he grips in his other hand, ready to cut the boy's neck. A certain aspect remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated remarkable expressive skill. There exists not just fear, shock and begging in his darkened eyes but also profound grief that a protector could abandon him so completely.

The artist took a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold directly in front of the viewer

Viewing in front of the painting, observers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled hair and nearly black eyes – features in two other paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly emotional face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed appendages demonic, a naked child running riot in a well-to-do residence.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a London museum, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently painful longing, is portrayed as a very real, brightly illuminated unclothed form, standing over toppled-over objects that include musical instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – except here, the melancholic mess is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, just prior to this work was created around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.

As the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a city ignited by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many occasions previously and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.

However there was another side to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's attention were everything but devout. What could be the absolute earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A young man opens his red lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.

The adolescent sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through images, the master represented a renowned female prostitute, holding a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: intimacy for sale.

How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some art historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.

His initial works do offer explicit erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, identified with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black sash of his garment.

A several annums following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly established with prestigious church projects? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a more intense, uneasy manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A English traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

The painter had been dead for about forty years when this account was recorded.