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A young boy cries out as his skull is forcefully gripped, a large digit pressing into his face as his parent's mighty hand holds him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery grey blade he holds in his remaining hand, ready to slit the boy's neck. A certain element remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary expressive skill. Within exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally profound grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

The artist took a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to happen directly in front of the viewer

Viewing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise record of a young subject, because the same youth – recognizable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark eyes – features in several other paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his dark plumed wings demonic, a naked child running chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly illuminated nude form, straddling overturned items that comprise stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an architect's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love depicted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted many times before and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.

However there was another side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, only talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's attention were everything but holy. That could be the absolute earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his red lips in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber reflected in the murky liquid of the transparent container.

The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio represented a renowned female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for purchase.

What are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was not the queer hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some art scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.

His early works indeed offer explicit erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark sash of his garment.

A few annums following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost established with important church projects? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

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