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A young lad cries out as his skull is forcefully held, a large digit pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his son, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. Yet the father's preferred method involves the silvery grey blade he grips in his remaining hand, ready to slit Isaac's throat. One certain element remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated remarkable expressive skill. There exists not just fear, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally profound grief that a protector could abandon him so completely.

He adopted a well-known biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold right in view of you

Viewing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a real face, an precise depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly black eyes – appears in several other works by the master. In each case, that highly emotional visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black feathery wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.

Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a very real, brightly illuminated unclothed form, straddling toppled-over objects that include stringed devices, a music score, metal armour and an architect's ruler. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted blind," penned Shakespeare, shortly prior to this work was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master created his three 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 Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many occasions before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring directly before the spectator.

However there was a different aspect to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, just skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy city's attention were anything but holy. That may be the absolute earliest resides in London's art museum. A young man parts his crimson lips in a scream of pain: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the murky liquid of the glass vase.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through images, the master portrayed a famous woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for sale.

How are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.

His initial works indeed offer explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might look to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine gazes calmly at you as he starts to untie the black sash of his robe.

A several years after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian god revives the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, uneasy manner. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

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