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A youthful lad screams while his head is forcefully gripped, a massive digit digging into his face as his father's mighty hand holds him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single twist. Yet Abraham's preferred method involves the silvery grey blade he holds in his other palm, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. One definite aspect remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also profound grief that a protector could betray him so completely.

The artist adopted a well-known biblical tale and made it so fresh and raw that its terrors appeared to happen directly in front of you

Viewing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise record of a young subject, because the same youth – recognizable by his tousled hair and nearly dark eyes – appears in several other works by the master. In every instance, that richly emotional face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his black plumed wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often painful desire, is shown as a extremely real, vividly illuminated unclothed form, standing over overturned objects that include musical devices, a music manuscript, plate armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – save here, the gloomy mess is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the same unusual-looking kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed many times previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be happening directly before you.

However there was a different side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, just talent and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were everything but holy. What could be the absolute earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his red lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's dismal room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.

The adolescent wears a pink blossom in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in early modern painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, Caravaggio represented a famous female prostitute, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for sale.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the painter was not the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His initial works do offer explicit erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional initial work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.

A few years after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan god revives the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

The artist had been dead for about forty years when this story was recorded.