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A youthful boy cries out while his skull is forcefully held, a massive digit digging into his cheek 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 harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a single twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his other palm, ready to cut Isaac's neck. One certain element stands out – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable acting ability. Within exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

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

Viewing in front of the painting, observers identify this as a real countenance, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled hair and almost black eyes – features in two additional works by the master. In every instance, that highly emotional visage commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his black feathery wings sinister, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a very tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, standing over toppled-over items that comprise stringed instruments, a musical score, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save 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 feathered Love painted sightless," wrote the Bard, just before this work was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed religious artist in a city ignited by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted many occasions previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.

However there was another side to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, just skill and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were anything but holy. That could be the very earliest hangs in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson lips in a scream of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's gloomy room reflected in the murky waters of the glass container.

The boy sports a pink blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through images, the master represented a renowned female prostitute, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.

How are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – 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 past truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on film in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.

His early works do make overt sexual implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to another early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his garment.

A several annums following Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian god revives the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

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