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A youthful lad cries out while his skull is forcefully held, a large digit digging into his face as his parent's powerful palm holds him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the scriptural account. It seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary twist. However the father's preferred approach involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his remaining hand, prepared to cut the boy's throat. A definite aspect stands out – whomever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable acting skill. There exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but also deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

The artist adopted a well-known biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in view of the viewer

Standing before the painting, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and nearly black pupils – features in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each case, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed child running riot in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Viewers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing longing, is shown as a very real, brightly illuminated unclothed form, standing over overturned items that include musical instruments, a music manuscript, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love depicted blind," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three images of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a city 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 before and make it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be happening directly before you.

However there existed a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, only skill and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were anything but holy. What could be the very earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.

The adolescent wears a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but documented through photographs, the master represented a famous woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for purchase.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past reality is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain art scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.

His early works indeed offer explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, observers might look to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at you as he starts to undo the dark sash of his robe.

A several annums after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan deity resurrects the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A British visitor saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.

The painter had been dead for about 40 annums when this account was recorded.