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The young boy screams while his head is forcefully gripped, a large thumb pressing into his face as his father's powerful hand holds him by the neck. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. It seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could break his neck with a solitary turn. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the metallic steel blade he grips in his other hand, prepared to slit the boy's neck. A certain element stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. There exists not just fear, shock and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally profound grief that a protector could abandon him so completely.

He took a familiar scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to happen right in view of the viewer

Standing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly dark eyes – appears in several additional paintings by the master. In every instance, that richly expressive visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed wings sinister, a naked child running chaos in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a London museum, represents 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 very tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over items that comprise musical devices, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an architect's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly before this work was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the identical unusual-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a biblical story that had been depicted numerous times previously and render it so new, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be happening directly in front of the spectator.

Yet there existed another aspect to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a artist in his early twenties with no teacher or patron in the urban center, just skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were anything but holy. What could be the very first hangs in London's art museum. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.

The boy sports a pink blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in early modern art. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for sale.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex historical reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His initial paintings do offer overt erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might look to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares coolly at you as he begins to untie the dark sash of his robe.

A few years after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last becoming almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian god revives the sexual provocations of his early works but in a more powerful, unsettling way. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

The painter had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was documented.