Who was the dark-feathered deity of love? What insights that masterpiece reveals about the rogue artist

The youthful lad cries out while his skull is forcefully held, a large thumb pressing into his face as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the throat. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic steel blade he grips in his remaining hand, prepared to slit Isaac's throat. One certain aspect stands out – whomever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed remarkable acting skill. There exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally profound grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

The artist adopted a well-known scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold right in view of you

Viewing before the painting, observers identify this as a real face, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost black eyes – appears in two additional works by the master. In every case, that highly expressive face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his dark feathery wings sinister, a naked child running chaos in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a London museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly lit nude form, straddling overturned objects that comprise stringed instruments, a music manuscript, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he poses naked – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three images of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and render it so new, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.

However there existed another aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only skill and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's attention were everything but devout. What may be the absolute earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A young man opens his red mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the glass container.

The boy wears a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but known through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned woman courtesan, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.

His initial works do offer overt sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young artist, identified with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, observers might turn to another early work, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his robe.

A few annums after the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly established with important church projects? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller saw 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 assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

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