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The young boy cries out as his head is firmly held, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his father's powerful palm holds him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the suffering child from the biblical account. It seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. However Abraham's preferred method involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his other palm, ready to cut the boy's throat. A certain aspect remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed remarkable expressive ability. There exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally profound sorrow that a protector could betray him so completely.

The artist adopted a familiar scriptural tale and transformed it so fresh and raw that its terrors appeared to happen right in view of the viewer

Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled hair and nearly black eyes – appears in several other works by Caravaggio. In each case, that highly emotional face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness acquired on the city's alleys, his black feathery wings demonic, a unclothed child running chaos in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated nude figure, standing over overturned items that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love depicted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with bold assurance as he struts naked – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a city enflamed by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many times previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately before you.

Yet there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's eye were everything but devout. That could be the absolute first hangs in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. 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 container.

The boy wears a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, the master portrayed a famous woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for purchase.

What are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters ever since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.

His initial paintings do make explicit erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.

A several annums after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan god revives the erotic challenges of his early paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

The painter had been dead for about forty years when this story was documented.