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The youthful lad screams while his skull is firmly held, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand holds him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. However the father's chosen method involves the metallic grey blade he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to slit Isaac's throat. One certain element remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary expressive skill. Within exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also profound sorrow that a protector could betray him so utterly.

The artist took a well-known scriptural story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in front of you

Viewing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a young model, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark pupils – appears in two other works by Caravaggio. In each case, that highly expressive visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness acquired on the city's streets, his black feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed child running riot in a well-to-do dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often painful longing, is shown as a very tangible, brightly illuminated nude figure, standing over overturned items that comprise stringed devices, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Love depicted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master painted his multiple images of the identical unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed sacred artist in a city enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous times before and render it so new, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be happening directly in front of the spectator.

However there was a different side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early twenties with no teacher or patron in the city, only talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's eye were everything but holy. What could be the absolute earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his red lips in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.

The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for purchase.

What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some art scholars unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial works do offer explicit sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to another initial work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black ribbon of his robe.

A several years after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian god revives the erotic provocations of his early works but in a increasingly intense, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

The artist had been deceased for about 40 years when this account was recorded.