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A youthful lad cries out as his head is forcefully held, a large thumb digging into his face as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen method involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his remaining palm, ready to cut the boy's throat. One definite element stands out – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary acting skill. There exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

He adopted a familiar scriptural story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in view of the viewer

Standing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost dark pupils – features in two additional paintings by the master. In every case, that highly emotional visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his black plumed wings demonic, a naked child running riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated unclothed form, standing over overturned objects that comprise musical instruments, a musical score, plate armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love depicted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master painted his multiple images of the same unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a city enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been portrayed many occasions previously and render it so fresh, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be happening immediately in front of you.

However there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, just talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred metropolis's attention were anything but holy. What may be the absolute first resides in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass container.

The boy sports a pink blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a famous woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.

How are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some art historians improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His initial paintings indeed offer overt erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to another initial 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 black ribbon of his robe.

A few annums following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian deity revives the erotic challenges of his early works but in a more intense, uneasy way. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

The painter had been dead for about 40 years when this account was recorded.