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The young lad screams as his head is forcefully gripped, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the tormented youth from the biblical narrative. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a single twist. Yet Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic steel blade he grips in his other hand, prepared to cut the boy's neck. A certain element stands out – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated remarkable acting ability. There exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally profound grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

He adopted a well-known scriptural tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen directly in front of you

Standing before the painting, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate record of a young model, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark eyes – features in several other paintings by the master. In every instance, that richly emotional visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery wings sinister, a naked adolescent creating riot in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly lit unclothed figure, straddling overturned objects that include musical devices, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic disorder is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, just before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the identical unusual-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed religious artist in a city ignited by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted numerous occasions before and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of you.

However there was a different side to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, just talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were anything but holy. That could be the very first hangs in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can see the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the glass container.

The boy sports a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through images, the master represented a famous woman prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for sale.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex past reality is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic historians improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.

His early paintings indeed offer explicit erotic suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, identified with the city's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to an additional initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black sash of his garment.

A several annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing almost established with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A English traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

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