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A youthful boy cries out as his head is forcefully gripped, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the biblical account. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen method involves the metallic grey knife he grips in his remaining palm, ready to cut Isaac's neck. One certain aspect remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary acting skill. There exists not only dread, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but also deep grief that a protector could betray him so utterly.

The artist adopted a well-known biblical story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen right in front of the viewer

Viewing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly dark pupils – features in several additional works by the master. In every case, that richly emotional visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his black feathery wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a extremely real, vividly lit nude figure, straddling overturned items that include musical instruments, a music score, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly prior to this work was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen confidence as he poses naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master created his three images of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a city enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed many times previously and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately before you.

Yet there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were anything but holy. What may be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A young man opens his red lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: observers can see the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.

The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through images, the master portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as some artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial works indeed offer explicit sexual implications, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, observers might look to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.

A few years following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing almost established with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his early works but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A British visitor saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

The painter had been dead for about forty years when this account was documented.