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The youthful boy screams while his head is firmly gripped, a large digit digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty palm grasps him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical account. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a single turn. However the father's preferred approach involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his other palm, ready to slit the boy's throat. One definite element stands out – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not just fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

He took a familiar biblical tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold right in front of you

Viewing in front of the painting, observers identify this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark pupils – appears in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly expressive visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a London gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated nude form, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise stringed instruments, a music score, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in the German master's print Melancholy – except here, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind," penned the Bard, just prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated sacred painter in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous times before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately before you.

Yet there was another side to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, only talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's attention were everything but devout. That could be the very earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a yell of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass container.

The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans holding blooms and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio represented a famous woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for purchase.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the painter was neither the queer icon that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some art scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.

His initial works indeed offer explicit erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black sash of his garment.

A few years after the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This profane pagan deity revives the erotic provocations of his early works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

The painter had been dead for about 40 years when this account was documented.