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The young boy cries out as his head is firmly gripped, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his other hand, prepared to slit Isaac's throat. One definite aspect remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable expressive skill. Within exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but additionally profound sorrow that a protector could betray him so completely.

The artist adopted a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to happen directly in view of the viewer

Standing before the painting, viewers identify this as a real face, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly dark eyes – features in two additional works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly expressive face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a well-to-do 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. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over objects that include musical instruments, a musical score, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except here, the melancholic disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Love sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love painted blind," wrote the Bard, just prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he poses naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the same distinctive-looking youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a city enflamed by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted many occasions previously and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror seemed to be happening directly before you.

However there existed a different side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy city's eye were anything but devout. What could be the absolute earliest hangs in London's National Gallery. A young man opens his red mouth in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.

The boy wears a pink blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.

How are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a question that has split his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past reality is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His early paintings do make overt erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might look to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.

A several annums following Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing almost respectable with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly intense, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A British visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.

The artist had been deceased for about 40 years when this account was recorded.