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The youthful lad cries out while his head is forcefully gripped, a large digit digging into his cheek as his father's powerful hand holds him by the neck. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. Yet the father's preferred method involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his remaining palm, ready to slit Isaac's throat. A certain aspect stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not just fear, shock and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally deep grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

He adopted a well-known scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen directly in front of you

Viewing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an accurate record of a young model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost dark pupils – features in several other works by Caravaggio. In each case, that richly emotional face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his black feathery wings sinister, a naked adolescent running chaos in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very real, brightly lit unclothed form, straddling overturned items that include stringed instruments, a music score, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at you. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he poses naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated sacred painter in a city enflamed by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been portrayed numerous times previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror appeared to be happening immediately before you.

However there was a different aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the city, just skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's attention were everything but devout. That may be the very earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A young man parts his red mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the murky waters of the glass vase.

The boy wears a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through images, the master portrayed a famous female courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is clear: sex for sale.

How are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as some artistic scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial paintings do make overt sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to an additional early creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at you as he starts to undo the dark sash of his garment.

A several annums following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing nearly established with important church commissions? This profane pagan deity revives the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller saw the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

The artist had been deceased for about 40 annums when this account was recorded.