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A youthful lad screams as his skull is forcefully gripped, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the throat. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the biblical account. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet the father's preferred method involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his remaining hand, ready to slit Isaac's neck. A certain element stands out – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally profound sorrow that a protector could betray him so utterly.

The artist adopted a well-known scriptural story and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to happen right in view of the viewer

Standing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a real face, an accurate record of a young subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark eyes – features in several other works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness acquired on the city's streets, his black plumed wings demonic, a naked adolescent creating riot in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often painful desire, is shown as a very real, vividly lit unclothed form, standing over toppled-over items that comprise musical devices, a music score, plate armour and an architect's T-square. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and construction equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – save here, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Love looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted sightless," penned the Bard, just before this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he poses naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a metropolis 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 portrayed numerous occasions previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately before the spectator.

However there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were everything but devout. What could be the absolute first hangs in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.

The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio represented a famous woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.

How are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of boys – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated past reality is that the artist was not the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain art historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.

His initial works indeed offer overt sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to another early work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark sash of his robe.

A few years following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly established with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane pagan god revives the erotic challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio'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] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

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