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A youthful lad cries out as his head is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb digging into his face as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his spinal column with a single twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his other palm, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. One certain element stands out – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not just fear, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

He took a familiar biblical story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen right in view of you

Standing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a young subject, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark eyes – appears in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his black feathery wings sinister, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a very real, brightly lit unclothed form, straddling overturned items that include musical instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the melancholic disorder is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love painted blind," penned the Bard, shortly before this work was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at you. That face – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he poses naked – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three portrayals of the identical unusual-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many occasions previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.

Yet there existed another side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial twenties with no mentor or patron in the city, just talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's eye were everything but holy. What could be the absolute earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see the painter's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.

The boy sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but known through images, the master represented a famous female prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as some art scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.

His initial paintings indeed offer overt sexual suggestions, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to an additional early work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.

A few annums following Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian god revives the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a more intense, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

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