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The youthful boy screams while his head is forcefully held, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the tormented youth from the scriptural narrative. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet the father's chosen method involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to slit Isaac's throat. A definite element stands out – whomever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary expressive skill. Within exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but also profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

He adopted a familiar scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in view of you

Viewing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a real face, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost dark eyes – appears in two other paintings by the master. In each case, that richly emotional face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his dark plumed wings sinister, a naked adolescent creating riot in a affluent dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful desire, is portrayed as a very real, vividly lit unclothed form, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a music manuscript, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted blind," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the identical distinctive-looking kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious artist in a city ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many occasions previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring directly before you.

However there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early twenties with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred city's eye were anything but holy. That may be the very first hangs in London's art museum. A youth parts his red lips in a scream of pain: while reaching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.

The adolescent wears a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through images, the master represented a famous female courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.

How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic scholars unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His early works indeed make explicit erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark sash of his robe.

A several annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the erotic provocations of his early works but in a more intense, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A British visitor saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

The painter had been deceased for about 40 years when this story was recorded.