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A young boy cries out as his head is forcefully gripped, a large digit digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the metallic grey knife he grips in his remaining hand, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. One certain aspect remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing piece displayed remarkable expressive ability. There exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but also deep grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.

The artist took a familiar scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold right in view of you

Viewing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the same youth – identifiable by his tousled locks and nearly black eyes – appears in two other paintings by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly expressive visage commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness acquired on Rome's streets, his black plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed child creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly lit nude form, straddling overturned objects that include musical devices, a musical score, metal armour and an builder's T-square. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love depicted blind," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he poses naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a city enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted many occasions before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring directly before you.

Yet there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, just skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred city's eye were everything but holy. What may be the absolute first resides in London's art museum. A youth opens his red lips in a scream of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.

The boy wears a pink flower in his hair – a emblem of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for sale.

What are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was neither the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some art historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His early paintings do offer explicit erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might look to another early work, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.

A few years following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost established with prestigious church commissions? This unholy non-Christian deity revives the erotic challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

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