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The youthful lad cries out as his head is firmly gripped, a massive digit digging into his face as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary twist. However the father's chosen approach involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his other hand, prepared to slit the boy's throat. One certain aspect stands out – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable acting ability. Within exists not just dread, shock and begging in his shadowed eyes but additionally profound grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

The artist adopted a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen right in front of the viewer

Standing before the painting, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the same youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost dark pupils – appears in several other paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly emotional face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark plumed wings sinister, a naked child creating riot in a well-to-do residence.

Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful desire, is portrayed as a very real, brightly lit unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over items that include stringed instruments, a music score, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the ground in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Cupid depicted sightless," penned the Bard, just before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred artist in a city enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed numerous times previously and render it so new, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.

Yet there existed another aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, just skill and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred city's eye were everything but holy. That may be the very earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A young man parts his red mouth in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female courtesan, clutching a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for sale.

How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.

His initial works indeed make overt erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might look to another early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly at you as he begins to undo the dark sash of his robe.

A several years following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan deity revives the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A British traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

The painter had been deceased for about forty annums when this story was documented.