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A young boy cries out as his head is forcefully held, a massive digit digging into his face as his parent's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical account. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a single turn. However the father's chosen approach involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his other hand, prepared to cut the boy's throat. One definite element stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable acting ability. Within exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.

He took a familiar scriptural story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen right in view of you

Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled locks and nearly black eyes – appears in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly expressive face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his black feathery appendages sinister, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly illuminated unclothed form, straddling overturned objects that comprise stringed devices, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Love painted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly prior to this work was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

As the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the same distinctive-looking youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a metropolis ignited by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been portrayed many occasions previously and render it so new, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately before the spectator.

However there existed another side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he caught the sacred metropolis's eye were anything but holy. What could be the very first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his red lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.

The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned female courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for sale.

How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past reality is that the artist was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some art scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.

His initial works indeed make explicit sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to an additional early work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at you as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his robe.

A several annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with prestigious church projects? This profane pagan god revives the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A English traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

The artist had been dead for about forty years when this account was recorded.