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The youthful lad screams as his head is forcefully gripped, a large digit digging into his cheek as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the tormented youth from the biblical account. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his neck with a single turn. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his other hand, ready to cut Isaac's throat. A certain aspect remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable expressive skill. There exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but also deep sorrow that a protector could betray him so completely.

He took a well-known scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold right in view of the viewer

Viewing in front of the painting, observers identify this as a real face, an precise depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost dark pupils – features in several additional paintings by the master. In each instance, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on the city's alleys, his dark plumed wings sinister, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly illuminated nude form, standing over toppled-over items that comprise stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love depicted sightless," penned the Bard, just prior to this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master painted his three images of the same unusual-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a city enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed numerous times before and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring directly in front of you.

Yet there was another side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial twenties with no teacher or patron in the city, just skill and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's attention were everything but devout. What could be the very first resides in London's art museum. A youth opens his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while reaching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent container.

The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his hair – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a famous woman courtesan, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for purchase.

How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.

His initial paintings indeed offer explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his robe.

A several years after the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost established with prestigious church projects? This profane pagan god resurrects the sexual challenges of his early works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A English visitor saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.

The painter had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was recorded.