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The young lad screams as his head is firmly held, a large thumb pressing into his face as his parent's powerful palm holds him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. The painting appears as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his remaining hand, prepared to cut the boy's neck. One certain aspect stands out – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.

He took a well-known biblical tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in front of the viewer

Viewing in front of the painting, observers identify this as a actual face, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark eyes – features in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly expressive face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery wings demonic, a unclothed child running riot in a well-to-do residence.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a very real, brightly illuminated nude figure, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise stringed devices, a music score, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – save here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love painted blind," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master created his three images of the same distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a city ignited by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous occasions before and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be happening directly before the spectator.

Yet there existed another side to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a artist in his early twenties with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, just skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the sacred city's eye were anything but holy. That may be the very first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A young man opens his red lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass container.

The boy sports a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex commerce in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned female prostitute, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for sale.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex past reality is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on film in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His early works indeed offer explicit sexual implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, observers might turn to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.

A several years following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost respectable with important church commissions? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

The painter had been dead for about 40 annums when this account was documented.