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The young lad cries out while his skull is firmly held, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the throat. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a single turn. However Abraham's chosen method involves the metallic grey knife he holds in his other palm, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. One definite aspect remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable acting ability. Within exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep grief that a protector could betray him so utterly.

The artist took a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to unfold right in front of the viewer

Standing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a real face, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost dark eyes – appears in several other paintings by Caravaggio. In each case, that highly emotional face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed wings sinister, a naked child creating riot in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely real, brightly lit nude form, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a musical score, metal armour and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Love looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he poses naked – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master painted his multiple images of the identical distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a city enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions previously and render it so new, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately before the spectator.

However there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred city's eye were anything but devout. What may be the very earliest resides in London's art museum. A young man opens his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the murky waters of the glass vase.

The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a work lost in the second world war but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.

How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some art historians improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.

His early paintings indeed offer explicit erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful artist, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to an additional early work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine gazes calmly at you as he begins to undo the black sash of his garment.

A several years following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan god revives the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.

The artist had been dead for about forty annums when this story was documented.