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The youthful lad screams as his head is forcefully gripped, a massive digit digging into his face as his parent's powerful palm holds him by the neck. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. However the father's preferred approach involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his other palm, ready to cut the boy's throat. A definite element remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable acting ability. Within exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

The artist took a familiar biblical tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in front of the viewer

Viewing before the artwork, observers identify this as a real countenance, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly dark pupils – appears in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly emotional face dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his black feathery appendages demonic, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly lit unclothed form, standing over toppled-over items that include stringed instruments, a music manuscript, metal armour and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save here, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Love painted blind," wrote the Bard, just prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the same distinctive-looking youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed religious artist in a city ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous times previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring directly before you.

Yet there existed a different aspect to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the city, just talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy metropolis's eye were anything but holy. That could be the very first hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his red mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent container.

The adolescent sports a pink blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through photographs, the master represented a famous woman prostitute, holding a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for sale.

How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art scholars unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.

His early paintings do offer explicit erotic suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.

A few annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost established with prestigious church projects? This unholy non-Christian deity revives the sexual provocations of his early works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

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