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The youthful boy screams as his head is firmly held, a large digit pressing into his face as his father's mighty hand holds him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical account. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a single turn. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic steel blade he grips in his other palm, prepared to slit the boy's throat. A certain aspect remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.

The artist adopted a well-known biblical story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen right in front of you

Standing in front of the painting, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled hair and almost black pupils – appears in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly emotional visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his dark plumed wings demonic, a naked child creating riot in a affluent dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly lit unclothed figure, straddling overturned objects that comprise stringed instruments, a musical score, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the melancholic mess is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Love depicted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly before this work was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master created his three images of the same distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring directly in front of you.

Yet there existed a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, just talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy city's attention were everything but devout. That could be the absolute first resides in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the murky liquid of the glass container.

The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a famous woman prostitute, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past reality is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some art scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.

His early works do make explicit sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his robe.

A several years following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly established with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a more powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British visitor saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

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