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The youthful boy cries out while his head is forcefully gripped, a large digit digging into his cheek as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his spinal column with a single twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his other palm, ready to cut Isaac's throat. A definite aspect stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary acting skill. Within exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.

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

Viewing before the artwork, observers identify this as a real face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost dark pupils – features in two other works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his dark plumed wings demonic, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated nude form, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a music manuscript, metal armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the melancholic mess is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the same distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted many times previously and render it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be happening directly in front of you.

Yet there was another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded 1592, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were everything but devout. What could be the very earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his red mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass container.

The boy sports a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a work lost in the second world war but known through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned female courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain art historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.

His initial paintings indeed offer overt sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, observers might turn to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.

A several annums after the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly established with prestigious church commissions? This unholy pagan god resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A British traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

The artist had been deceased for about forty years when this account was documented.