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A youthful lad cries out as his skull is forcefully held, a massive thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a single turn. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his other hand, ready to slit the boy's throat. A definite element stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed extraordinary acting skill. Within exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.

He adopted a familiar scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to happen directly in view of the viewer

Viewing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a young model, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost black eyes – features in several other paintings by Caravaggio. In each case, that richly emotional visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his dark feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed child running riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a very tangible, brightly lit unclothed form, standing over overturned objects that include musical instruments, a music manuscript, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the melancholic disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Love depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, just prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares straight at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master created his multiple images of the same distinctive-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a city enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted numerous occasions previously and make it so fresh, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be happening immediately before you.

Yet there was a different aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he came in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy city's attention were anything but devout. What could be the absolute earliest hangs in London's art museum. A youth opens his crimson lips in a scream of pain: while reaching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass container.

The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, the master represented a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex historical reality is that the painter was not the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some art scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.

His initial paintings indeed make explicit sexual implications, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to an additional initial work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine gazes calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.

A several annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan god revives the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a more intense, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

The painter had been dead for about 40 years when this story was recorded.