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A young boy cries out as his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his son, could snap his neck with a single twist. Yet Abraham's preferred method involves the silvery grey blade he grips in his remaining hand, ready to slit the boy's neck. A definite element stands out – whomever posed as Isaac for this astonishing piece demonstrated extraordinary acting skill. Within exists not just fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but additionally profound grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

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

Standing before the painting, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a adolescent subject, because the same youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark pupils – appears in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly emotional visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's alleys, his dark feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed child running riot in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a extremely real, vividly illuminated unclothed figure, standing over overturned items that include musical devices, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except in this case, the melancholic 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 feathered Love painted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many times previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately before the spectator.

Yet there was a different side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, just skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he caught the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but devout. What could be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room reflected in the murky waters of the transparent container.

The adolescent sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans holding blooms and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a famous female prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.

His initial paintings indeed offer explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might look to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.

A few years following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing almost established with prestigious church projects? This unholy pagan god resurrects the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

The artist had been dead for about 40 years when this story was recorded.