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A youthful lad cries out as his head is forcefully gripped, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary turn. However the father's chosen approach involves the silvery grey blade he grips in his other palm, ready to slit Isaac's neck. One certain element stands out – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work demonstrated remarkable acting ability. There exists not just dread, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

The artist took a well-known scriptural story and transformed it so fresh and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in front of the viewer

Standing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost black eyes – features in two additional works by Caravaggio. In every case, that richly emotional visage commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a naked adolescent running riot in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely real, vividly lit nude figure, straddling toppled-over items that include stringed devices, a musical score, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy mess is caused by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master painted his three images of the identical distinctive-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions before and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be happening directly in front of you.

Yet there existed a different aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only talent and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy city's attention were anything but devout. What could be the absolute first hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his red mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's dismal room mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent container.

The adolescent wears a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the painter was neither the queer icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His early works do offer explicit erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, observers might look to another initial work, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes calmly at you as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.

A few years following Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with prestigious church commissions? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly intense, uneasy manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.

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