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The young lad screams as his head is forcefully held, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural account. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet the father's preferred method involves the silvery grey blade he holds in his other hand, ready to slit the boy's neck. A definite aspect remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but also deep grief that a protector could abandon him so completely.

He took a well-known biblical story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen right in view of the viewer

Standing before the artwork, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the same youth – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost black eyes – appears in two additional works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive visage commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Viewers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a very real, brightly illuminated nude form, straddling toppled-over items that include stringed instruments, a music score, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Love sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Cupid depicted sightless," penned the Bard, just prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold confidence as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the same unusual-looking kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a city enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted many times previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring directly before you.

However there was another side to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, just skill and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's attention were anything but devout. What could be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his red lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent vase.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for purchase.

What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a question that has split his commentators since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as some art historians improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.

His early paintings do offer overt erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young artist, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to another initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark sash of his garment.

A several annums following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with important church projects? This unholy non-Christian deity revives the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A English traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

The painter had been deceased for about 40 annums when this account was recorded.