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The young boy screams as his skull is firmly held, a large thumb pressing into his face as his parent'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 child from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a single turn. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic steel knife he grips in his remaining hand, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. One definite aspect stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable expressive ability. There exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

He took a familiar scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold right in front of the viewer

Viewing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a young subject, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost black eyes – appears in two additional works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly expressive face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness acquired on the city's streets, his dark plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed child creating riot in a well-to-do dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, vividly lit nude form, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise musical devices, a music manuscript, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," penned the Bard, just prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he struts naked – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three images of the identical unusual-appearing kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a city enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical story that had been depicted many occasions before and make it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.

However there was a different side to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the city, just talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the holy city's eye were anything but holy. That may be the very first hangs in London's art museum. A young man opens his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's dismal room mirrored in the murky waters of the glass vase.

The adolescent wears a pink blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master represented a renowned female prostitute, holding a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

How are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of a particular boy 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 artist was not the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art scholars unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.

His initial works do offer explicit erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might look to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the black sash of his garment.

A several annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan god resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a more intense, unsettling way. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

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