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The youthful boy screams as his head is firmly held, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his father's powerful palm holds him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented youth from the biblical narrative. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his other hand, prepared to cut the boy's neck. One certain element stands out – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work demonstrated remarkable acting ability. Within exists not just dread, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but also profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.

He took a familiar biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to happen right in view of the viewer

Standing in front of the painting, observers identify this as a real face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost dark pupils – features in several other paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly expressive visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his black plumed appendages sinister, a naked child creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Viewers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly lit nude form, standing over overturned items that comprise stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just before this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-faced, looking with bold assurance as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.

As the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the same distinctive-looking youth in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed sacred artist in a city enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been depicted numerous occasions previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be happening directly before you.

However there was a different aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, just talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the holy metropolis's eye were anything but devout. What may be the very earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the murky waters of the glass container.

The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, the master portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.

What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was neither the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.

His early paintings do make overt erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares coolly at you as he starts to untie the dark sash of his garment.

A few years after the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly established with important church projects? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

The painter had been deceased for about 40 annums when this account was recorded.