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A youthful lad cries out as his skull is forcefully held, a massive digit digging into his face as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the biblical account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a single twist. Yet Abraham's chosen method involves the silvery steel knife he holds in his remaining hand, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. A certain element remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable acting ability. Within exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but also profound sorrow that a protector could betray him so completely.

The artist took a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in view of you

Standing in front of the painting, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate record of a adolescent subject, because the same youth – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost black eyes – features in several additional paintings by the master. In every instance, that highly emotional face dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his black feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed child running chaos in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, vividly lit nude form, standing over toppled-over objects that include musical instruments, a music score, metal armour and an architect's T-square. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear strewn across the ground in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save here, the melancholic disorder is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love depicted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly prior to this work was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the same distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been portrayed numerous times before and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately before the spectator.

Yet there was another 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 initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, only talent and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the sacred city's attention were anything but devout. What could be the absolute earliest resides in London's art museum. A young man parts his red lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass container.

The adolescent sports a pink blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for sale.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.

His early paintings do make explicit erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol gazes calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his garment.

A few annums after the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost respectable with important church commissions? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.

The painter had been dead for about 40 annums when this account was documented.