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The young lad screams as his skull is firmly held, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single twist. Yet Abraham's preferred method involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his remaining palm, ready to slit Isaac's throat. A definite aspect stands out – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable acting skill. There exists not just fear, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but also deep grief that a protector could betray him so utterly.

The artist took a familiar biblical story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold right in front of the viewer

Viewing before the painting, observers identify this as a real face, an precise depiction of a young subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly black eyes – appears in several other works by the master. In each instance, that highly expressive face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness acquired on the city's alleys, his dark feathery appendages sinister, a naked child creating riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly lit unclothed form, straddling overturned items that comprise stringed instruments, a music score, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy mess is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Love looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted blind," penned Shakespeare, just before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master created his three portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous times previously and make it so new, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be happening immediately before the spectator.

However there existed another aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, only skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were anything but holy. That could be the very first hangs in London's art museum. A young man opens his red lips in a yell of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern art. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned female courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.

How are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His early paintings do offer overt sexual implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to another initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.

A few annums after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing almost established with important ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian deity revives the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a more intense, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

The painter had been dead for about 40 years when this story was documented.