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The young boy cries out while his head is forcefully held, a large thumb pressing into his face as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Florentine museum, evoking distress through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary twist. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. One definite element stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not only fear, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.

The artist adopted a well-known biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold directly in view of you

Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an accurate record of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled locks and nearly dark eyes – features in several additional works by the master. In every instance, that highly emotional face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness acquired on the city's alleys, his dark plumed appendages demonic, a naked child creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly lit unclothed form, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love depicted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly before this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That face – ironic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three images of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted many occasions before and render it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.

Yet there existed a different side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy city's attention were everything but holy. That could be the very first resides in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the glass container.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex trade in Renaissance art. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans holding flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for sale.

What are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex historical reality is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on film 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 portrait of Jesus.

His initial paintings indeed offer overt erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at you as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.

A several years following the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming almost established with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane pagan god revives the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a more intense, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

The painter had been dead for about forty annums when this story was documented.