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A young boy screams as his skull is firmly held, a large digit digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty palm grasps him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his remaining hand, ready to cut the boy's throat. One definite element remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally profound grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.

He adopted a well-known biblical tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen right in view of the viewer

Viewing before the artwork, observers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled locks and nearly black pupils – appears in two other paintings by the master. In each instance, that richly expressive visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark plumed wings demonic, a naked child creating riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly illuminated unclothed form, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a music manuscript, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – except here, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love depicted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the same unusual-looking youth in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a city ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many times previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening immediately in front of the spectator.

However there was a different side to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, just skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred metropolis's attention were everything but devout. What could be the very first resides in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent container.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his hair – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for sale.

How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic historians improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.

His initial paintings do make overt erotic implications, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to another initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at you as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his robe.

A few annums following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy pagan god resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a more intense, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A English visitor viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

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