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The young lad cries out as his skull is firmly gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the tormented youth from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet Abraham's chosen method involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his other palm, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. A definite element stands out – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not just dread, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.

He took a well-known biblical story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen right in front of you

Standing in front of the painting, observers recognize this as a real face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his tousled locks and nearly dark eyes – features in several other works by the master. In every instance, that highly expressive face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his dark feathery wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, standing over overturned objects that comprise musical devices, a music manuscript, plate armour and an architect's T-square. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly before this work was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master created his three portrayals of the same unusual-looking kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious painter in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous times before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be happening directly before you.

However there existed a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the holy city's attention were everything but holy. What could be the very first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his red lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent container.

The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio represented a renowned female prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.

How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the artist was not the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some art scholars unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.

His initial works do offer overt erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to an additional initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the black sash of his garment.

A several annums after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with important church projects? This profane non-Christian deity revives the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A British visitor viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.

The artist had been dead for about forty annums when this story was recorded.