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A young boy screams as his skull is firmly gripped, a large thumb pressing into his face as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the biblical account. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could break his neck with a solitary twist. Yet the father's preferred method involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to slit Isaac's throat. A definite element remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not just dread, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

He adopted a familiar scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold right in view of the viewer

Viewing before the artwork, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost black pupils – features in two additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly emotional face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his black feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent running riot in a affluent dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated nude form, standing over toppled-over items that include musical devices, a musical score, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This heap of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Love painted blind," wrote the Bard, just prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple portrayals of the same distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous times before and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening directly in front of the spectator.

However there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, just talent and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's eye were anything but devout. That could be the very first resides in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent container.

The boy wears a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for sale.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? 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 presented on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His early paintings do offer explicit erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to another early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black sash of his garment.

A several annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing almost established with prestigious church projects? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

The painter had been deceased for about 40 years when this story was documented.