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The youthful lad screams while his head is firmly gripped, a large thumb digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. However the father's preferred method involves the metallic grey blade he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to slit the boy's throat. One definite aspect stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated remarkable expressive skill. There exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

He adopted a familiar scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to happen right in front of the viewer

Standing before the painting, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly black pupils – appears in two additional works by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly expressive visage commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his dark plumed wings demonic, a unclothed child running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a extremely real, vividly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling overturned items that include stringed devices, a music score, metal armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction equipment scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold confidence as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been depicted many times previously and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of you.

Yet there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he came in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, just skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he caught the sacred metropolis's attention were everything but devout. That could be the very first hangs in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his red mouth in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent container.

The boy wears a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through images, the master portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for purchase.

What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain art scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His early paintings indeed offer explicit erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to an additional initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at you as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his robe.

A few years following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan god resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a more intense, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

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