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The youthful lad cries out as his head is forcefully gripped, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful palm holds him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Florentine museum, creating distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a single twist. However the father's preferred approach involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his other palm, ready to slit Isaac's throat. A certain aspect stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable acting skill. There exists not just fear, shock and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally profound grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

The artist adopted a familiar scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold right in front of you

Standing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate record of a young model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and almost dark eyes – features in two additional paintings by the master. In every instance, that highly emotional visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on the city's streets, his black plumed wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often painful longing, is shown as a very real, brightly illuminated nude form, standing over overturned items that comprise stringed instruments, a musical score, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save here, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the same unusual-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a city enflamed by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been depicted numerous times before and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring directly before the spectator.

However there was another aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he came in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, just talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred city's attention were anything but devout. That could be the absolute earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy room mirrored in the murky waters of the glass vase.

The adolescent sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through images, the master represented a renowned female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for purchase.

What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His initial works do make explicit sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young creator, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to an additional early work, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.

A few years after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly established with important ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan god revives the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century 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 Francesco.

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