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The young boy screams while his skull is forcefully held, a large digit digging into his cheek as his father's powerful hand holds him by the throat. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking unease through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single turn. However the father's preferred approach involves the silvery steel knife he holds in his other palm, prepared to slit the boy's throat. A certain element remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. There exists not just fear, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep grief that a protector could betray him so completely.

The artist took a familiar biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to happen directly in view of you

Viewing before the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real face, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the same youth – recognizable by his disheveled hair and nearly black pupils – features in two other paintings by the master. In each instance, that richly emotional face dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness acquired on the city's streets, his dark plumed wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a affluent dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a London gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly lit nude figure, standing over overturned objects that comprise stringed instruments, a musical score, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Love looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted blind," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many times previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be happening immediately in front of the spectator.

Yet there existed another side to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, just talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's eye were everything but devout. What may be the absolute first resides in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his red lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room reflected in the murky waters of the transparent vase.

The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: intimacy for sale.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators ever since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the painter was neither the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His initial paintings indeed make overt erotic implications, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might look to another early creation, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol gazes calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black sash of his robe.

A few years after the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly established with prestigious church commissions? This profane pagan god resurrects the erotic challenges of his early works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

The artist had been deceased for about 40 annums when this account was recorded.