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A youthful lad screams as his head is forcefully held, a large digit digging into his face as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical account. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet the father's preferred method involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his other hand, ready to slit the boy's neck. A certain aspect stands out – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but also profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.

The artist adopted a well-known biblical tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in view of the viewer

Viewing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a real face, an precise depiction of a young subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost dark eyes – appears in two additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every case, that richly expressive visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his dark feathery appendages demonic, a naked adolescent creating riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed form, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise stringed devices, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Love sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred artist in a city ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been depicted many occasions previously and render it so new, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be happening directly before the spectator.

Yet there was a different side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were everything but devout. What could be the very earliest hangs in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the murky liquid of the glass container.

The adolescent wears a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for purchase.

What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on film in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art scholars unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.

His early works do offer explicit erotic suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with the city's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at you as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.

A few annums following Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing almost established with prestigious church projects? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the erotic challenges of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

The painter had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was documented.