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A youthful lad cries out as his head is firmly gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's mighty hand holds him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural account. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a single twist. Yet the father's chosen method involves the metallic grey knife he grips in his other hand, prepared to cut the boy's throat. A certain element remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a protector could betray him so utterly.

He took a well-known biblical tale and made it so fresh and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in view of the viewer

Viewing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly black eyes – appears in several other paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly expressive visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his black plumed wings sinister, a naked child creating chaos in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very real, vividly lit unclothed form, straddling overturned items that comprise stringed devices, a musical score, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – except in this case, the melancholic mess is created by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Love sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love depicted sightless," penned the Bard, just prior to this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master created his three images of the same distinctive-looking youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted numerous times previously and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be happening immediately before you.

Yet there was a different aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in Rome in the winter that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, just skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were anything but holy. That may be the very first resides in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass vase.

The boy sports a pink flower in his hair – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for sale.

What are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as some art historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial works do offer explicit erotic implications, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, observers might look to another early work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine gazes calmly at you as he begins to untie the dark sash of his robe.

A several annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly established with important church projects? This profane pagan god resurrects the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A British visitor viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

The artist had been dead for about 40 years when this story was documented.