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The young lad screams while his head is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical account. It seems as if the patriarch, instructed by God to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen method involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his other palm, ready to cut the boy's neck. A definite element stands out – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

The artist adopted a familiar biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold right in front of the viewer

Standing in front of the painting, observers identify this as a real face, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and almost dark pupils – features in two other works by the master. In each case, that richly emotional face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness acquired on the city's alleys, his black plumed appendages sinister, a naked child running riot in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently agonizing longing, is shown as a very real, brightly lit nude form, standing over toppled-over objects that include stringed devices, a musical score, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction equipment scattered across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the melancholic mess is created by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Love depicted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this work was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred painter in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted many occasions before and render it so new, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of you.

Yet there was a different side to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, just skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy city's attention were anything but devout. That may be the absolute first hangs in London's art museum. A youth parts his red mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the murky liquid of the glass vase.

The boy sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned female courtesan, holding a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is clear: intimacy for sale.

How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some art scholars unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.

His initial works indeed offer explicit erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, observers might turn to another initial work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he starts to undo the black ribbon of his robe.

A few years after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last becoming almost established with prestigious church projects? This profane pagan god resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a more intense, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A English visitor saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.

The painter had been deceased for about 40 annums when this account was recorded.