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The young boy screams while his skull is forcefully held, a massive digit pressing into his face as his father's powerful palm holds him by the throat. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could break his neck with a solitary twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the silvery grey blade he grips in his other palm, ready to slit the boy's throat. A definite aspect stands out – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

The artist adopted a well-known scriptural tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors seemed to unfold right in view of the viewer

Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an precise record of a young subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost dark pupils – features in two additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his dark feathery wings sinister, a naked adolescent creating riot in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly lit nude form, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a musical score, metal armor and an architect's ruler. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melancholy – save here, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this work was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master painted his three images of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed many occasions before and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.

However there existed another aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, just talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the holy city's attention were anything but holy. That could be the absolute first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A young man opens his red mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.

The boy wears a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio represented a famous female courtesan, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.

How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain art scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.

His initial works indeed make explicit erotic implications, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark sash of his robe.

A few annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly established with prestigious church commissions? This profane non-Christian god revives the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A English visitor 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 laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

The artist had been dead for about 40 annums when this account was recorded.