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A young boy screams as his head is firmly held, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the biblical account. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his other hand, ready to cut the boy's neck. One certain aspect stands out – whomever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable acting skill. There exists not just fear, shock and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally profound grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

He adopted a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen right in front of the viewer

Viewing before the painting, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an accurate record of a young model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost black eyes – appears in several other works by the master. In each case, that highly emotional face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his black feathery appendages demonic, a naked child running riot in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly illuminated nude form, straddling toppled-over objects that include stringed instruments, a music manuscript, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save here, the gloomy mess is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love depicted blind," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this work was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with bold confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams 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 highly acclaimed sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a biblical story that had been portrayed many times previously and make it so new, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be happening immediately before the spectator.

However there existed another side to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he came in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's eye were everything but devout. What could be the absolute first resides in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his red mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the second world war but documented through photographs, the master represented a renowned female courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for purchase.

What are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex past reality is that the artist was not the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His initial paintings do offer overt sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, observers might look to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black sash of his garment.

A several years after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming almost established with important church commissions? This unholy non-Christian deity revives the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

The painter had been dead for about forty years when this story was documented.