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A young lad screams while his skull is forcefully held, a large thumb digging into his face as his father's mighty hand holds him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a single turn. However Abraham's chosen method involves the metallic steel blade he grips in his other palm, prepared to cut the boy's throat. A definite aspect remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally profound grief that a protector could betray him so completely.

He took a familiar scriptural story and transformed it so fresh and raw that its horrors appeared to happen directly in view of you

Viewing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate record of a young subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly black pupils – appears in several additional works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly expressive visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his black feathery appendages sinister, a naked adolescent running chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a very real, brightly lit unclothed figure, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise stringed instruments, a music manuscript, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except in this case, the melancholic disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love depicted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly before this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master painted his multiple images of the identical unusual-looking kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a city ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many times previously and render it so fresh, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.

Yet there was a different side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the city, just talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the sacred metropolis's eye were anything but devout. That may be the very earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his red lips in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.

The adolescent sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through photographs, the master represented a famous woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past reality is that the artist was not the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some art scholars unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His early paintings do offer explicit erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares coolly at you as he starts to untie the black sash of his robe.

A few annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly established with important ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan god resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

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