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The young lad cries out as his head is firmly held, a large digit digging into his face as his father's mighty hand holds him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary turn. However the father's preferred approach involves the metallic grey knife he holds in his other palm, prepared to cut the boy's neck. A certain element remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed extraordinary expressive skill. Within exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but also profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

He adopted a familiar scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to unfold right in front of you

Standing before the painting, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly dark eyes – features in several other paintings by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly emotional visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his black feathery wings demonic, a unclothed child creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly lit unclothed form, standing over overturned objects that include musical devices, a music manuscript, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – except here, the melancholic disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, shortly before this work was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a city enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed many times before and render it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be happening immediately before you.

Yet there existed a different side to the artist, evident as soon as he came in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial twenties with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the holy city's attention were everything but devout. What could be the absolute first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his red mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the murky liquid of the glass vase.

The boy wears a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio represented a famous female prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.

How are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the artist was not the homosexual icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some art scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.

His early works indeed make overt erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might look to another early creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at you as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.

A few annums following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This profane pagan deity resurrects the erotic challenges of his early works but in a more intense, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A British visitor viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

The artist had been deceased for about 40 annums when this account was documented.