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A youthful lad cries out as his head is forcefully gripped, a large thumb digging into his face as his father's mighty hand holds him by the neck. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical account. It seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a single turn. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his remaining hand, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. One definite element stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. There exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally profound grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

He adopted a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold directly in view of the viewer

Viewing before the painting, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly black pupils – features in two other works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly emotional face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness acquired on the city's alleys, his black feathery appendages demonic, a naked child running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is portrayed as a very tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over items that include stringed instruments, a musical score, plate armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic mess is created by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love depicted blind," penned the Bard, just prior to this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a city ignited by religious revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.

However there existed another side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, just talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred city's attention were everything but devout. What could be the absolute earliest hangs in London's art museum. A young man parts his crimson lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the transparent container.

The boy wears a pink blossom in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the artist was not the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some art scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.

His early works do offer overt sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young creator, aligned with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.

A few annums after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

The painter had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was recorded.