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The young lad cries out as his skull is firmly held, a large digit pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his son, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. However the father's preferred approach involves the metallic grey blade he holds in his remaining palm, ready to cut Isaac's throat. One certain aspect remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. There exists not only dread, shock and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

He took a well-known biblical tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen directly in view of the viewer

Standing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate record of a young subject, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost dark pupils – features in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every case, that richly emotional face commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on the city's streets, his black feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed child creating chaos in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly lit unclothed figure, straddling overturned objects that include stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Love sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Love depicted sightless," penned the Bard, just before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with bold assurance as he struts naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three images of the identical unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many occasions previously and render it so new, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be happening directly before the spectator.

However there was another side to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's attention were everything but devout. That may be the absolute earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his red mouth in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.

The adolescent wears a pink blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but known through images, Caravaggio represented a famous female prostitute, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for purchase.

How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.

His early paintings indeed make explicit erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to another early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his robe.

A few years after Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming almost established with important church projects? This unholy pagan deity revives the erotic provocations of his early works but in a increasingly intense, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

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