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A youthful lad cries out as his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive digit pressing into his face as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural account. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery steel knife he holds in his other palm, ready to cut the boy's throat. One certain element remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable expressive skill. There exists not just fear, shock and begging in his darkened gaze but also profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.

The artist adopted a familiar biblical story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen directly in view of you

Standing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a young model, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark pupils – features in several additional works by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly emotional visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's streets, his black feathery wings demonic, a naked child running riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated unclothed form, straddling overturned items that comprise musical instruments, a musical score, metal armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Cupid painted sightless," penned the Bard, just before this work was created around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed sacred painter in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted many occasions before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be happening immediately in front of you.

Yet there existed another side to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, just talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were anything but holy. What could be the very first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but known through images, the master portrayed a renowned female prostitute, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for sale.

How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators ever since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely 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 including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to another initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at you as he starts to undo the black ribbon of his robe.

A few years after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with prestigious church commissions? This profane pagan god resurrects the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a increasingly intense, uneasy manner. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British 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 youth or servant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

The painter had been dead for about forty years when this account was recorded.