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The youthful lad cries out as his head is forcefully held, a large digit digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand holds him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the tormented youth from the scriptural narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his spinal column with a single twist. However the father's chosen approach involves the metallic grey blade he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. One certain aspect remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. There exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but also deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

The artist took a well-known biblical tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen right in front of the viewer

Standing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a young model, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark pupils – appears in two other paintings by the master. In every instance, that highly expressive visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's streets, his black feathery wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a well-to-do dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel totally unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly lit nude form, straddling overturned objects that comprise stringed instruments, a musical score, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Love sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind," penned the Bard, shortly before this work was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the identical unusual-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous times before and render it so fresh, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring directly before you.

However there existed a different aspect to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the sacred city's attention were anything but devout. What could be the very first resides in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his red mouth 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 poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.

The adolescent sports a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work lost in the second world war but known through photographs, the master portrayed a famous woman prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as some art historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.

His initial paintings do make explicit sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, observers might look to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his robe.

A several annums following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with important church projects? This profane pagan deity revives the erotic provocations of his early works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

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