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A young lad cries out while his head is forcefully held, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his father's powerful palm holds him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating unease through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the tormented youth from the biblical narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. However the father's chosen method involves the metallic steel blade he grips in his other palm, ready to cut Isaac's neck. One definite aspect stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable expressive skill. Within exists not just fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

The artist took a well-known scriptural story and made it so fresh and raw that its terrors seemed to happen directly in view of the viewer

Standing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark eyes – features in two other works by the master. In every instance, that richly expressive visage commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness acquired on the city's alleys, his dark feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed child creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly lit nude form, straddling toppled-over items that include musical devices, a music manuscript, metal armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of items resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and construction equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save here, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted blind," wrote the Bard, just prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the identical unusual-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a city enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted many times before and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately before the spectator.

Yet there existed another side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, just talent and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he caught the holy city's attention were everything but devout. That could be the absolute first resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his red lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.

The adolescent sports a pink blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a famous female prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain art historians improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His initial works do offer overt sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black sash of his garment.

A several years after the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with prestigious church projects? This unholy non-Christian god revives the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A English traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

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