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The young lad screams while his skull is firmly held, a large digit pressing into his cheek as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented youth from the biblical narrative. It seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a single twist. However Abraham's preferred method involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his other palm, ready to cut Isaac's throat. A definite element remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed remarkable expressive ability. There exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

The artist adopted a familiar biblical tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in front of you

Viewing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual face, an precise record of a young model, because the same youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark pupils – features in several additional works by the master. In each case, that highly expressive visage commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark plumed wings demonic, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a very tangible, brightly lit unclothed form, straddling toppled-over items that include musical instruments, a music manuscript, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Cupid painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master painted his multiple images of the identical unusual-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a metropolis ignited by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous times previously and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be happening directly before you.

However there existed another side to the artist, evident as soon as he came in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy city's attention were everything but holy. That could be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his red mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent container.

The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but known through photographs, the master portrayed a famous woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is clear: intimacy for sale.

How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has split his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was not the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His early works do offer explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at you as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.

A few annums following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with prestigious church commissions? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A English traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

The painter had been deceased for about forty years when this story was recorded.