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A youthful lad screams while his skull is firmly gripped, a large digit digging into his face as his parent's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a single twist. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his remaining hand, ready to slit Isaac's neck. One definite aspect remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not just fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

The artist adopted a well-known scriptural tale and transformed it so fresh and raw that its horrors seemed to happen right in view of the viewer

Viewing before the painting, observers identify this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a young model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark pupils – appears in several other paintings by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly expressive face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery wings demonic, a naked adolescent creating riot in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated unclothed form, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise stringed devices, a music score, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly prior to this work was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted numerous times before and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring directly in front of you.

However there existed another aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, just talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's attention were everything but holy. What may be the very first hangs in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his red lips in a scream of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent container.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding blooms and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous woman prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for sale.

How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 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 likeness of Jesus.

His early paintings indeed make explicit erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to an additional early creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes calmly at you as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his robe.

A few years after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy pagan god revives the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

The painter had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was recorded.