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A youthful lad cries out while his head is forcefully gripped, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the scriptural narrative. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. However the father's chosen approach involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his remaining hand, prepared to cut Isaac's throat. One definite element remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but also profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.

He adopted a familiar scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to happen right in front of the viewer

Viewing before the painting, observers identify this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly black eyes – appears in two other works by the master. In each instance, that highly expressive face dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his black feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly lit unclothed figure, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a music score, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love depicted sightless," wrote the Bard, just before this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with bold confidence as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master created his three images of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a city enflamed by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed many times previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring directly in front of you.

However there was another aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only skill and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy metropolis's eye were everything but holy. What may be the very first resides in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent container.

The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through photographs, the master represented a renowned woman courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for purchase.

How are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His initial works do make overt erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares coolly at you as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his garment.

A several annums following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with prestigious church projects? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

The artist had been dead for about 40 annums when this story was documented.