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The young lad screams while his skull is firmly gripped, a large digit pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. It seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. Yet Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic steel blade he grips in his other palm, ready to cut the boy's throat. One certain aspect remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable acting ability. There exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also profound grief that a protector could abandon him so completely.

He took a well-known scriptural story and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold directly in front of the viewer

Viewing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled hair and almost dark eyes – features in several additional works by the master. In every case, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness acquired on the city's alleys, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a very tangible, vividly illuminated nude figure, straddling overturned objects that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Love sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid painted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes directly at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master created his three images of the identical unusual-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred artist in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been depicted many times previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be happening directly in front of you.

Yet there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, only talent and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's attention were everything but devout. That could be the absolute earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A young man opens his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through images, the master represented a famous woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.

What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic historians improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.

His initial paintings do make overt erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to another initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at you as he starts to undo the black sash of his robe.

A several annums after Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a more intense, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller 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 servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.

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