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The youthful lad cries out as his head is firmly held, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his father's powerful hand holds him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his remaining palm, prepared to slit the boy's neck. A certain aspect remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. There exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also profound grief that a protector could betray him so utterly.

The artist adopted a well-known scriptural tale and transformed it so fresh and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold right in front of the viewer

Viewing in front of the painting, observers identify this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled locks and nearly black pupils – features in several additional paintings by the master. In each instance, that highly emotional face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his dark plumed wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly lit unclothed form, straddling toppled-over items that comprise musical instruments, a musical score, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the floor in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Cupid painted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

As the Italian master created his multiple images of the same distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a city ignited by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been portrayed many times before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring directly before the spectator.

Yet there was another side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early twenties with no teacher or patron in the city, only talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were everything but devout. That could be the very first resides in London's art museum. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.

The adolescent wears a pink blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.

How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some art scholars unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial paintings do make explicit erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares coolly at you as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.

A several annums after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming nearly established with important ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian god revives the erotic challenges of his initial works but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.

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