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The young boy screams as his skull is firmly gripped, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical narrative. It seems as if the patriarch, instructed by God to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single turn. However the father's chosen approach involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his other hand, prepared to cut the boy's neck. A definite aspect stands out – whoever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally profound grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

He took a familiar biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in front of you

Standing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a real face, an accurate record of a young model, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark pupils – appears in several additional works by the master. In each case, that highly expressive face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's alleys, his black feathery wings sinister, a unclothed child creating riot in a well-to-do dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely real, brightly illuminated nude figure, standing over overturned items that include musical instruments, a music manuscript, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – save here, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted numerous occasions before and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror appeared to be happening directly in front of you.

However there existed a different side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, just skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred city's eye were everything but holy. That could be the very first hangs in London's National Gallery. A young man opens his red lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's dismal room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent container.

The adolescent wears a pink blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio represented a famous female prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic historians improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.

His initial works indeed offer overt sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might look to another initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at you as he starts to undo the black sash of his garment.

A few years following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly established with important church commissions? This unholy pagan god revives the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a more intense, uneasy manner. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.

The artist had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was recorded.