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A young boy cries out as his head is firmly held, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his father's powerful palm holds him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a single twist. However the father's preferred method involves the metallic grey blade he holds in his other hand, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. One definite aspect stands out – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed extraordinary acting skill. Within exists not just fear, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.

He adopted a well-known scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold right in front of you

Standing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost black eyes – features in several additional works by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly expressive face dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his black plumed wings sinister, a naked child running chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly lit unclothed form, standing over overturned objects that comprise musical devices, a musical score, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy mess is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just before this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with bold assurance as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted numerous occasions previously and render it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring directly in front of you.

However there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were everything but holy. What could be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth parts his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can see the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female prostitute, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.

How are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as some art historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His early paintings indeed make overt sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to another initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at you as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his garment.

A several annums after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly established with prestigious church projects? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

The artist had been deceased for about 40 years when this story was documented.