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A young lad cries out while his skull is forcefully gripped, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the neck. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. However the father's chosen method involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his other palm, prepared to cut the boy's neck. A certain aspect stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not only fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but also deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.

The artist took a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold right in view of the viewer

Standing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost black eyes – appears in two additional works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly expressive visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark feathery appendages sinister, a naked adolescent running riot in a well-to-do dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated nude form, standing over overturned objects that comprise musical devices, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Love sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love depicted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just before this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with bold assurance as he poses naked – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the same unusual-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a city enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring directly in front of you.

However there was another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial twenties with no teacher or patron in the city, just talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the sacred metropolis's attention were anything but holy. That could be the very earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his red lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.

The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a famous female courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some art historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.

His early paintings do make explicit erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his garment.

A few annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the erotic challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.

The artist had been deceased for about 40 annums when this account was documented.