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A youthful lad screams as his head is forcefully gripped, a large digit digging into his face as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could break his neck with a solitary turn. However the father's chosen method involves the metallic grey blade he holds in his other hand, prepared to slit the boy's throat. One definite aspect remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable acting ability. There exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but also deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.

The artist adopted a familiar scriptural story and transformed it so fresh and raw that its horrors appeared to happen right in front of you

Standing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a real face, an precise depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled hair and nearly dark eyes – features in two other works by Caravaggio. In each case, that highly expressive visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his dark plumed appendages demonic, a naked adolescent running riot in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely real, brightly lit unclothed figure, straddling overturned items that comprise stringed devices, a music score, metal armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love depicted blind," wrote the Bard, just prior to this work was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking kid in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a city ignited by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed many occasions before and render it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately before the spectator.

However there was a different aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, just skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he caught the sacred city's eye were anything but devout. What could be the very earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.

How are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some artistic scholars unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.

His initial works indeed make overt sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, identified with the city's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at you as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his robe.

A several annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing almost established with prestigious church commissions? This profane pagan deity revives the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly intense, uneasy way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

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