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The young lad screams as his head is forcefully gripped, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented youth from the scriptural account. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a single twist. Yet the father's preferred method involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. One certain element remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.

The artist took a well-known biblical story and made it so fresh and raw that its horrors seemed to happen directly in front of the viewer

Standing before the painting, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate record of a young subject, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly black eyes – features in several other works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly emotional visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black feathery wings demonic, a naked child running chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a London gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a very real, vividly illuminated unclothed figure, standing over overturned objects that include musical instruments, a musical score, plate armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except here, the melancholic mess is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid painted blind," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master created his three images of the identical unusual-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many times before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the terror seemed to be happening immediately in front of the spectator.

Yet there was another aspect to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, just talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's eye were anything but devout. That could be the absolute earliest hangs in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his red mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal room reflected in the murky liquid of the glass container.

The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the painter was neither the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some art historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.

His initial works do offer overt sexual implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to an additional initial work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark sash of his robe.

A few years following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly established with important church commissions? This unholy pagan god revives the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

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