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The young lad cries out while his skull is firmly gripped, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand holds him by the throat. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented youth from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary turn. Yet Abraham's preferred method involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his remaining hand, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. A certain element remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing piece demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.

He adopted a well-known scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to happen directly in front of you

Viewing before the painting, observers recognize this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly black eyes – appears in several other works by the master. In every instance, that richly expressive face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his dark feathery appendages sinister, a naked adolescent running riot in a well-to-do dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated nude form, straddling overturned items that include musical devices, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic mess is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a city enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted numerous times previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring directly in front of you.

However there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a artist in his early twenties with no teacher or patron in the city, just skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were anything but devout. That could be the very first resides in London's art museum. A young man opens his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see the painter's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent container.

The adolescent sports a pink blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female prostitute, clutching a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some art historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His early works indeed offer explicit sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.

A several years following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost established with important church projects? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

The painter had been deceased for about 40 years when this account was documented.