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The youthful lad screams as his skull is firmly gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his father's mighty hand holds him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his other palm, prepared to cut the boy's throat. One definite element stands out – whomever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable acting ability. Within exists not just fear, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally deep grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

The artist took a familiar biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold right in view of the viewer

Viewing in front of the painting, observers identify this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a young model, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly black pupils – features in two other paintings by the master. In every instance, that richly expressive visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black feathery appendages sinister, a naked child creating riot in a well-to-do dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over items that comprise stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Love sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid painted sightless," wrote the Bard, just before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a metropolis ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could adopt a biblical story that had been depicted many occasions previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening directly before the spectator.

Yet there was another side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, only talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the holy city's attention were everything but devout. What may be the absolute earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent container.

The boy sports a pink blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.

His early works do make explicit erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, observers might look to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark sash of his robe.

A few years after Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly established with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the sexual provocations of his early works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A British visitor viewed 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 servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

The artist had been dead for about 40 annums when this account was documented.