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The young lad screams while his head is forcefully held, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's mighty palm holds him by the throat. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a single twist. However the father's chosen method involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to cut Isaac's throat. One definite element remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a protector could betray him so completely.

He adopted a familiar scriptural story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold right in view of the viewer

Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost dark pupils – features in two additional works by the master. In every instance, that richly expressive face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his black plumed wings sinister, a naked child running chaos in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly illuminated unclothed figure, standing over overturned objects that include musical instruments, a musical score, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melancholy – except here, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted sightless," penned the Bard, just before this work was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three images of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many occasions before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of you.

Yet there was another aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, just skill and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's eye were anything but holy. What may be the very first resides in London's art museum. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.

How are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated past reality is that the artist was not the queer hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as some artistic scholars unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.

His early works do make overt erotic suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to an additional initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at you as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.

A few annums following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly established with prestigious church projects? This unholy non-Christian deity revives the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

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