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The young boy cries out as his head is forcefully gripped, a large digit digging into his face as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the biblical account. It appears as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. Yet the father's chosen method involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his remaining hand, prepared to slit the boy's throat. One definite element remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. There exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but also deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.

The artist took a well-known biblical story and transformed it so fresh and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold directly in front of you

Standing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his tousled locks and nearly black eyes – features in two other paintings by the master. In every case, that highly expressive face commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness acquired on the city's streets, his dark plumed wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly lit nude figure, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise stringed instruments, a music score, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love painted blind," wrote the Bard, just before this work was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares directly at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master created his three images of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted many occasions previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately before you.

Yet there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, only talent and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's eye were anything but holy. That could be the very earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his red lips in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see the painter's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.

The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for sale.

How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.

His early works indeed make overt sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with the city's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at you as he starts to undo the black sash of his garment.

A several annums after the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming nearly established with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.

The artist had been dead for about forty years when this account was documented.