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A young lad cries out as his head is firmly gripped, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his father's powerful hand holds him by the throat. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the biblical account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet Abraham's chosen method involves the metallic steel knife he grips in his other palm, ready to cut the boy's throat. One definite aspect stands out – whoever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable acting ability. There exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a protector could betray him so completely.

The artist adopted a well-known scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to happen directly in view of the viewer

Viewing in front of the artwork, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the identical boy – identifiable by his tousled hair and almost dark pupils – appears in several other paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly emotional face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his dark feathery wings demonic, a unclothed child running chaos in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly lit unclothed figure, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a music manuscript, metal armour and an architect's T-square. This pile of items echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – save here, the melancholic mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen confidence as he poses naked – 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 Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a city enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could take a biblical story that had been portrayed numerous times before and render it so fresh, so raw and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring directly before you.

However there existed a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's eye were everything but devout. What may be the absolute first hangs in London's art museum. A young man opens his red lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass container.

The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through photographs, the master represented a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the artist was not the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.

His early works do offer explicit erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to another early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.

A few annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost established with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan deity revives the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.

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