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The young lad screams as his head is forcefully held, a large digit pressing into his face as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a solitary turn. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic grey knife he holds in his other palm, prepared to slit the boy's neck. One definite aspect stands out – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece demonstrated remarkable acting ability. There exists not just fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.

The artist adopted a well-known scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold directly in view of the viewer

Viewing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a real face, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the same youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly dark pupils – appears in two other paintings by the master. In each case, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his dark plumed wings sinister, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a London gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a very tangible, vividly lit unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over items that include stringed devices, a music score, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Love sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love depicted blind," penned Shakespeare, just prior to this work was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares straight at you. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the identical unusual-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed many occasions before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately before you.

Yet there existed a different side to the artist, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the city, just talent and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he caught the holy city's attention were everything but holy. That could be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his red lips 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 see the painter's dismal room mirrored in the murky waters of the glass vase.

The boy sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans holding flowers and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through images, the master represented a famous woman prostitute, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.

How are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain art historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His early paintings do offer overt sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to undo the black sash of his garment.

A several annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy non-Christian deity revives the erotic challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, uneasy way. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A British traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

The painter had been dead for about forty years when this story was documented.