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A youthful lad screams as his head is firmly gripped, a massive thumb digging into his face as his father's mighty palm holds him by the throat. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet the father's preferred method involves the silvery grey blade he holds in his other palm, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. A certain element remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary acting skill. Within exists not just dread, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also profound grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.

He took a well-known scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold right in view of the viewer

Standing before the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate record of a young model, because the same youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly dark pupils – features in two additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his black plumed wings demonic, a naked child running chaos in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Viewers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated nude figure, straddling toppled-over items that comprise stringed instruments, a music manuscript, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – except here, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master painted his three images of the same unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed many times before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately before you.

However there was a different aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy city's eye were anything but holy. That may be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room 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 painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, the master portrayed a famous female courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was not the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art scholars unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His early works indeed make explicit erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might look to another initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he begins to undo the dark sash of his robe.

A few annums after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan deity revives the erotic challenges of his early paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A British traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

The artist had been deceased for about forty annums when this story was documented.