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A youthful lad screams while his skull is forcefully gripped, a large digit digging into his cheek as his parent'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 child from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if the patriarch, instructed by God to kill his son, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. However Abraham's preferred method involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his other palm, prepared to cut the boy's neck. A certain element remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not just fear, shock and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

The artist took a well-known scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in front of you

Standing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate record of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost black pupils – appears in two other paintings by the master. In each case, that richly expressive face dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his black feathery appendages sinister, a naked adolescent running riot in a affluent dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly lit unclothed form, standing over overturned items that include stringed instruments, a music score, plate armour and an architect's T-square. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save in this case, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Love sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted blind," penned the Bard, just prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious painter in a city enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening immediately before the spectator.

However there existed another side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, only skill and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were anything but holy. What may be the absolute first resides in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the transparent container.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but documented through images, the master represented a famous woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.

How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic historians improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His initial works do offer explicit erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, viewers might look to another early work, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black sash of his garment.

A several years following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with important church commissions? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own 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 account was recorded.