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The young lad screams while his head is firmly held, a large thumb digging into his face as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary turn. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his other hand, ready to cut the boy's neck. One certain element stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary expressive skill. Within exists not just fear, shock and begging in his darkened gaze but also deep grief that a protector could betray him so utterly.

He adopted a familiar scriptural tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its terrors appeared to happen right in front of the viewer

Viewing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a real face, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost black pupils – appears in several additional works by the master. In each case, that highly expressive visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black plumed wings sinister, a unclothed child creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly lit nude figure, standing over overturned items that comprise musical instruments, a musical score, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – except here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love painted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master painted his multiple images of the same unusual-looking kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening directly in front of you.

Yet there was another side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial twenties with no mentor or patron in the city, just skill and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were everything but devout. That could be the very first hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but known through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for purchase.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the artist was not the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain art historians unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.

His initial paintings indeed offer explicit erotic suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at you as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.

A few annums after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

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