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A young boy screams as his skull is forcefully gripped, a large thumb digging into his face as his father's powerful palm holds him by the throat. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the biblical account. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. However the father's chosen method involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his other hand, ready to slit Isaac's throat. One definite aspect stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece demonstrated remarkable expressive skill. There exists not only dread, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

He adopted a familiar scriptural story and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in front of the viewer

Viewing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a actual face, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the same youth – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost black eyes – appears in two additional paintings by the master. In every instance, that richly expressive face dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his dark plumed appendages demonic, a naked child running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with frequently painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly lit unclothed form, standing over toppled-over objects that include musical devices, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melancholy – except here, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love depicted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master painted his three images of the same unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed many times before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the terror seemed to be happening directly before you.

Yet there was another side to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, only skill and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's attention were anything but holy. That may be the very first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A young man opens his red lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.

The adolescent wears a pink blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.

What are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was not the queer icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as some artistic historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His early paintings indeed offer explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young creator, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to an additional initial work, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at you as he starts to undo the black sash of his robe.

A several annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his early works but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

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