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A youthful lad screams as his skull is forcefully held, a large digit digging into his cheek as his father's mighty hand holds him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a solitary turn. However the father's preferred approach involves the metallic steel knife he grips in his remaining hand, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. One definite element stands out – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. There exists not just fear, shock and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally profound grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.

The artist took a well-known scriptural story and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in front of you

Standing in front of the painting, observers recognize this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly black eyes – features in several additional works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful longing, is portrayed as a very real, vividly illuminated nude figure, standing over overturned objects that include musical devices, a music manuscript, metal armor and an architect's T-square. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – save here, the gloomy mess is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this work was created around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at you. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with bold confidence as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous times previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring directly before the spectator.

Yet there existed a different side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, just talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were anything but devout. That could be the absolute earliest hangs in London's art museum. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.

The boy wears a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master represented a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was not the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.

His initial paintings do make explicit erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to another initial work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.

A several annums after Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming almost established with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane pagan god revives the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a more intense, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

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