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The youthful lad screams as his head is forcefully gripped, a large thumb pressing into his face as his father's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Florentine museum, evoking distress through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. However the father's preferred approach involves the silvery grey blade he holds in his other palm, ready to cut Isaac's neck. A certain aspect remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but also profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

He adopted a familiar biblical story and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold right in front of you

Viewing before the painting, observers recognize this as a real face, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost black pupils – appears in several other paintings by the master. In each case, that highly emotional visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his black feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London museum, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely real, vividly lit unclothed figure, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise stringed devices, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save here, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he poses naked – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three images of the same unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a city ignited by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous times previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening immediately in front of the spectator.

Yet there existed another aspect to the artist, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, only skill and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but devout. That could be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his red mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned female courtesan, holding a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.

What are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some art historians improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial paintings do make explicit erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to another early creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he begins to untie the dark sash of his robe.

A few years after the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

The painter had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was documented.