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The youthful lad screams as his head is forcefully gripped, a large digit pressing into his face as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a single turn. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to cut the boy's neck. One certain aspect remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not only fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but also profound grief that a protector could betray him so completely.

He took a familiar biblical story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in view of you

Standing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the same youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly dark eyes – appears in two additional works by the master. In each instance, that highly expressive visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his dark feathery wings sinister, a naked child running chaos in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a very real, vividly illuminated nude figure, standing over overturned objects that comprise musical devices, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an architect's T-square. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love painted blind," penned the Bard, just before this work was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the identical unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a metropolis ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many occasions previously and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening directly before the spectator.

Yet there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, only skill and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were everything but devout. What may be the absolute first resides in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his red mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching 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 room reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through images, the master portrayed a famous woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for sale.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical reality is that the artist was not the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.

His initial paintings indeed make overt erotic implications, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might look to another early work, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.

A few years following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing almost respectable with important church commissions? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.

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