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The young boy screams as his head is firmly gripped, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty palm grasps him by the throat. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the tormented youth from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a single turn. However the father's preferred approach involves the metallic grey knife he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. One definite element stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed gaze but also profound grief that a protector could betray him so completely.

He took a well-known scriptural story and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to happen directly in view of the viewer

Standing before the painting, observers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a young subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark pupils – features in two additional works by the master. In every instance, that highly emotional visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a well-to-do dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly lit unclothed figure, standing over overturned objects that include stringed instruments, a music manuscript, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just before this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master created his three portrayals of the identical unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a city ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many times previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be happening immediately before you.

However there existed another side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, just talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but devout. That could be the absolute earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent container.

The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding flowers and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through images, the master represented a famous woman courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for purchase.

What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain art historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial works indeed offer explicit erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might look to an additional initial work, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black sash of his garment.

A several annums following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost respectable with important church commissions? This unholy pagan deity revives the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

The painter had been deceased for about forty years when this story was recorded.