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A young lad screams while his skull is firmly held, a large digit digging into his face as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. However the father's chosen approach involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his remaining hand, ready to cut Isaac's neck. One certain aspect stands out – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing piece displayed remarkable acting ability. Within exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally profound sorrow that a protector could betray him so completely.

He took a familiar biblical story and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to happen right in view of the viewer

Standing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a real countenance, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his tousled locks and nearly dark eyes – features in two additional works by the master. In each case, that richly emotional visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed child running chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly lit unclothed figure, standing over overturned items that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except here, the melancholic mess is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Love sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love painted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just before this work was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three images of the same distinctive-looking youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous occasions before and make it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be happening immediately before you.

However there existed a different side to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, only talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's eye were anything but holy. What may be the very first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his red lips in a yell of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the glass container.

The adolescent sports a pink blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master represented a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for purchase.

What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the painter was neither the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some art historians unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.

His initial works do offer overt sexual suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the dark sash of his robe.

A several annums after the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost established with important church commissions? This profane pagan god revives the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.

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