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A youthful boy cries out as his head is firmly gripped, a large digit pressing into his face as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. However Abraham's chosen method involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his other palm, prepared to cut the boy's neck. A certain element remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable acting ability. Within exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

He adopted a well-known biblical story and made it so fresh and visceral that its terrors appeared to happen right in front of the viewer

Viewing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual countenance, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost black eyes – appears in two other paintings by the master. In each instance, that richly emotional face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his black feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated nude form, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a music manuscript, plate armour and an architect's T-square. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the same unusual-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted many times before and render it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be happening immediately before the spectator.

However there was another aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he came 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, just skill and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the holy city's attention were anything but devout. What may be the absolute earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his red lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.

The adolescent sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in Renaissance art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans holding blooms and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio represented a renowned female courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the painter was not the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.

His early paintings indeed make overt erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young artist, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to another initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.

A several annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian god revives the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

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