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A young lad cries out while his skull is firmly held, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his father's mighty hand holds him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by God to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. However the father's chosen approach involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his remaining palm, ready to slit Isaac's throat. A definite aspect remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not only fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

The artist adopted a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen directly in view of you

Standing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost dark eyes – appears in two additional works by the master. In each instance, that richly emotional visage commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark plumed wings demonic, a naked child running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very real, vividly illuminated nude figure, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise stringed devices, a music score, metal armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the melancholic disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master painted his three images of the same distinctive-looking kid in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred painter in a city ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately in front of you.

However there existed a different side to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, just talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the holy city's attention were everything but holy. That could be the absolute earliest hangs in London's art museum. A youth parts his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the murky waters of the glass vase.

The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a famous woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain art scholars unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His early paintings indeed make explicit sexual implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might look to another early work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at you as he starts to undo the black sash of his garment.

A several annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost established with prestigious church commissions? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the erotic provocations of his early works but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

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