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A youthful boy screams while his head is firmly held, a large digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the scriptural account. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his remaining hand, prepared to slit the boy's neck. A definite element remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. There exists not just fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a protector could betray him so completely.

The artist adopted a well-known biblical tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold right in front of the viewer

Standing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a young subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost dark pupils – appears in several additional paintings by the master. In each instance, that richly expressive visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness learned on the city's alleys, his black plumed appendages demonic, a naked child creating riot in a affluent dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is shown as a very real, brightly illuminated unclothed form, straddling toppled-over items that comprise musical devices, a musical score, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This pile of items echoes, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except in this case, the melancholic mess is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted blind," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this work was created around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the same unusual-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many times before and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be happening directly before the spectator.

However there was another aspect to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, just skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred city's eye were anything but devout. That may be the absolute first resides in London's art museum. A young man parts his red mouth in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.

The adolescent wears a pink flower in his hair – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes holding blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female prostitute, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for sale.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the artist was not the homosexual hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some art historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.

His initial paintings do make overt erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might look to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at you as he begins to undo the dark sash of his robe.

A several years after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly established with prestigious church commissions? This profane non-Christian deity revives the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A English traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

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