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The youthful boy screams as his head is forcefully gripped, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his father's mighty hand holds him by the neck. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, evoking unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural account. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to kill his son, could snap his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic steel knife he grips in his other palm, ready to slit the boy's throat. A certain element remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable acting skill. Within exists not just fear, shock and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally profound grief that a protector could abandon him so completely.

He adopted a well-known biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold right in front of you

Viewing before the painting, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost black eyes – appears in two other works by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly emotional visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness acquired on the city's alleys, his dark feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly illuminated nude figure, straddling toppled-over items that include stringed instruments, a music manuscript, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – except in this case, the melancholic disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love painted blind," penned the Bard, shortly before this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the identical unusual-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions before and make it so fresh, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring directly before the spectator.

However there existed another side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the city, just skill and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were anything but holy. That could be the absolute earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.

The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in early modern art. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master represented a renowned female courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.

How are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain art historians improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.

His early works indeed make explicit erotic implications, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, identified with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might look to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black sash of his garment.

A few years following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This profane pagan god revives the erotic challenges of his early works but in a increasingly intense, uneasy way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A British visitor saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

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