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A youthful lad screams while his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive digit pressing into his face as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if the patriarch, instructed by God to kill his son, could snap his neck with a single turn. However the father's preferred method involves the metallic steel knife he grips in his remaining hand, ready to cut Isaac's neck. A certain element stands out – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. There exists not just fear, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but additionally profound grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

He adopted a familiar scriptural story and made it so fresh and raw that its horrors appeared to happen directly in front of the viewer

Viewing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark pupils – appears in two additional paintings by the master. In every case, that highly expressive visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black feathery appendages demonic, a naked child creating chaos in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a London museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a very tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed form, straddling toppled-over objects that include stringed instruments, a music manuscript, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy mess is caused by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Cupid painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just before this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – ironic and rosy-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 images of the identical distinctive-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions previously and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be happening immediately in front of the spectator.

Yet there existed a different side to the artist, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, just talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were anything but devout. What may be the very earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his red mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous woman prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past reality is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some art historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His initial paintings indeed offer explicit erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to an additional initial work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark sash of his robe.

A several annums following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing almost established with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

The artist had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was recorded.