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The young lad screams as his head is forcefully gripped, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his father's powerful hand holds him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a single turn. Yet Abraham's preferred method involves the silvery grey blade he grips in his other palm, prepared to slit Isaac's throat. A certain element stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but also deep grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

He adopted a familiar biblical tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen right in view of the viewer

Viewing before the painting, observers recognize this as a actual face, an precise record of a young subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost black pupils – features in two other works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly emotional visage commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark plumed wings sinister, a unclothed child creating riot in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly lit unclothed figure, straddling overturned items that include musical instruments, a musical score, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love painted sightless," wrote the Bard, just before this work was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That face – ironic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen confidence as he poses naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master created his multiple images of the identical distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed numerous times previously and render it so new, so raw and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring directly in front of you.

However there existed another side to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that ended 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no teacher or patron in the city, only skill and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the sacred metropolis's attention were everything but holy. That may be the absolute earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.

The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for purchase.

How are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the artist was not the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.

His early paintings do make explicit erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of wine gazes calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark sash of his garment.

A few annums after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with prestigious church projects? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a more intense, unsettling way. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

The painter had been dead for about forty annums when this story was recorded.