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A young boy cries out while his head is forcefully held, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his other palm, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. One certain element remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not just dread, shock and begging in his shadowed gaze but also profound grief that a protector could abandon him so completely.

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

Viewing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual countenance, an accurate record of a adolescent subject, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and nearly black eyes – appears in two additional paintings by the master. In every case, that highly emotional face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his dark feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly lit nude form, straddling toppled-over items that comprise musical instruments, a music score, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – except here, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares straight at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he poses naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a city enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be happening immediately before you.

However there was another aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, just talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the holy city's eye were anything but holy. That may be the absolute first resides in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent container.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through images, the master represented a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as some art scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His initial paintings indeed offer explicit sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might look to an additional initial work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.

A several years following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with important church projects? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British visitor viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

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