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The youthful lad screams while his skull is firmly held, a large thumb pressing into his face as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the suffering youth from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. However Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic steel knife he grips in his other palm, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. A definite aspect remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. There exists not just dread, shock and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally deep grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.

The artist adopted a well-known scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in view of the viewer

Standing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate record of a young subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly black pupils – features in several additional paintings by the master. In each instance, that richly emotional face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on the city's streets, his black feathery appendages demonic, a naked child running chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently agonizing longing, is portrayed as a very real, vividly lit unclothed form, straddling overturned items that include stringed instruments, a musical score, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save here, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

As the Italian master created his three portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been portrayed many times previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening directly in front of you.

However there existed a different side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, only talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the holy city's attention were everything but holy. What could be the absolute first hangs in London's art museum. A young man opens his red mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass container.

The boy wears a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is clear: intimacy for sale.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the artist was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain art historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His initial works indeed offer explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to an additional early creation, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at you as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.

A several years after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan deity revives the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

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