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The young lad screams as his head is firmly held, a large digit digging into his cheek as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could break his neck with a single turn. However Abraham's chosen method involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his other hand, prepared to slit the boy's throat. A definite aspect remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable acting skill. Within exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

He adopted a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen right in front of you

Viewing before the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost black pupils – appears in several additional works by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly emotional face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery wings demonic, a naked adolescent running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a very tangible, brightly illuminated nude form, standing over toppled-over items that comprise musical devices, a music score, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Love depicted blind," penned the Bard, shortly before this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious artist in a city enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many times previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be happening directly before you.

However there was a different aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he came in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, just talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but holy. What could be the very first resides in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.

His initial paintings indeed offer overt erotic suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at you as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.

A few years after the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical projects? This unholy pagan deity revives the erotic provocations of his early works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

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