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A young boy screams while his head is forcefully held, a large digit pressing into his face as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. However Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic grey knife he holds in his remaining hand, prepared to slit the boy's neck. One certain aspect remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not just dread, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but also deep grief that a protector could betray him so completely.

The artist adopted a familiar biblical story and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold right in front of the viewer

Standing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled hair and almost black pupils – appears in two additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly expressive visage commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed wings sinister, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly lit unclothed figure, standing over overturned objects that comprise musical devices, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Cupid depicted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares directly at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he poses naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions before and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror seemed to be happening immediately before the spectator.

However there existed a different aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, just skill and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were anything but holy. What could be the absolute first hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth parts his crimson lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent container.

The boy sports a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic commerce in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through photographs, the master represented a famous woman courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on film in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His early paintings do offer explicit sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, aligned with the city's sex workers, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to an additional initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at you as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.

A few years after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with important church projects? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a more intense, uneasy way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

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