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The young boy screams while his head is forcefully held, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering child from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single twist. However the father's preferred approach involves the silvery grey blade he grips in his remaining hand, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. A definite aspect remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed remarkable acting ability. There exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

The artist adopted a familiar scriptural story and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors seemed to unfold right in view of you

Standing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark pupils – features in two additional paintings by the master. In every instance, that richly emotional face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his dark feathery wings sinister, a unclothed child creating chaos in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly lit nude figure, straddling overturned objects that include stringed instruments, a musical score, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except here, the melancholic disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, just before this work was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with bold confidence as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the same unusual-appearing youth in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and make it so new, so raw and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately before the spectator.

However there was another side to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he came in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, just talent and boldness. The majority of the works with which he caught the sacred city's attention were everything but holy. What may be the absolute earliest hangs in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his red mouth in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the glass vase.

The boy wears a pink flower in his hair – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master represented a famous female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as some artistic historians improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.

His early works do offer explicit erotic implications, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to an additional early creation, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at you as he starts to undo the black sash of his robe.

A few annums after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with prestigious church commissions? This profane non-Christian god revives the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A English traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

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