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A young lad screams as his head is firmly held, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a single turn. However the father's preferred method involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his remaining palm, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. A certain aspect remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. There exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

He adopted a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to happen directly in front of the viewer

Standing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a young model, because the same youth – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost black pupils – appears in two additional works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his black feathery appendages demonic, a naked child creating riot in a affluent dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very real, brightly lit unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise stringed devices, a musical score, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love painted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three images of the identical unusual-appearing kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a city enflamed by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been depicted numerous occasions before and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be happening directly before the spectator.

However there existed another side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, only talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy city's eye were anything but holy. What could be the absolute first hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's dismal room reflected in the murky liquid of the transparent container.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored flower in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, the master represented a famous female courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.

How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the artist was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as some art historians improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.

His early paintings do make explicit erotic suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his garment.

A several annums after the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly established with important church projects? This profane pagan god revives the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

The artist had been deceased for about forty annums when this account was recorded.