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The youthful lad screams as his skull is forcefully held, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. However the father's chosen approach involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his other palm, ready to cut Isaac's neck. One certain element remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable acting skill. There exists not just fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

He took a familiar biblical tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold right in view of you

Standing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly dark eyes – appears in several other works by Caravaggio. In every case, that richly emotional face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is shown as a very real, brightly lit nude form, straddling toppled-over items that include stringed devices, a music manuscript, metal armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love painted sightless," penned the Bard, just before this work was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed many occasions previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be happening immediately before the spectator.

Yet there existed another side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no teacher or patron in the urban center, just talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's attention were everything but holy. That may be the very first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.

The adolescent wears a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but documented through images, the master portrayed a famous female prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for sale.

How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some art historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial works indeed offer overt erotic suggestions, or including offers. 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 consideration, observers might turn to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at you as he starts to undo the black ribbon of his robe.

A few years following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly established with important church projects? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his early works but in a more intense, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

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