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The youthful boy screams while his skull is firmly gripped, a large thumb pressing into his face as his parent's mighty palm grasps him by the throat. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering youth from the scriptural account. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary turn. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his other hand, prepared to cut Isaac's throat. One certain element stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable expressive skill. Within exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

He adopted a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to happen right in front of you

Standing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the same youth – recognizable by his disheveled hair and almost dark pupils – appears in two additional works by the master. In each case, that highly expressive visage commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his black plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed child creating riot in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise musical devices, a music manuscript, metal armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the floor in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with bold confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master painted his three images of the same distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated sacred painter in a city enflamed by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be happening directly before the spectator.

However there existed another side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, just talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were everything but devout. What may be the very earliest hangs in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his red lips in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent vase.

The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans holding blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master represented a famous female courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for purchase.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His early works indeed make explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, observers might turn to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark sash of his robe.

A few years following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A English traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

The artist had been dead for about forty annums when this account was documented.