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A young lad cries out as his head is firmly gripped, a massive digit digging into his face as his parent's powerful palm holds him by the throat. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering youth from the scriptural account. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a single turn. However the father's preferred method involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his other palm, ready to slit the boy's throat. One certain element remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.

The artist took a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in view of you

Viewing before the artwork, viewers recognize this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost dark pupils – appears in two other works by Caravaggio. In each case, that richly expressive face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed child creating riot in a well-to-do dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely tangible, vividly lit unclothed figure, straddling overturned objects that include musical instruments, a music manuscript, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save in this case, the melancholic mess is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love depicted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.

As the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the same unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a city ignited by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous times before and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately before you.

Yet there existed a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no mentor or patron in the city, only talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy city's attention were everything but holy. What could be the very earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his red mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the murky waters of the transparent vase.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his hair – a emblem of the sex trade in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans holding blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, the master portrayed a famous female prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.

How are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial paintings do offer explicit erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at you as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his garment.

A several years following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian god revives the erotic challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.

The artist had been dead for about forty annums when this story was recorded.