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A youthful boy screams as his skull is forcefully held, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his other hand, ready to cut Isaac's throat. One definite element stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed extraordinary expressive skill. Within exists not just dread, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but also profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.

He took a familiar biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold right in view of the viewer

Standing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a actual face, an precise record of a young model, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost dark eyes – appears in two other paintings by the master. In each instance, that richly expressive visage commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his dark feathery appendages demonic, a naked child running riot in a well-to-do dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a very real, brightly illuminated nude figure, standing over toppled-over items that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of items resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love depicted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He gazes directly at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions previously and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening immediately in front of the spectator.

However there was another aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's eye were everything but devout. That could be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his red lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent container.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for purchase.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.

His early paintings do offer explicit sexual implications, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at you as he starts to untie the dark sash of his robe.

A few annums after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical projects? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a more intense, uneasy way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

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