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The youthful boy cries out while his head is forcefully held, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the throat. That 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 narrative. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a single twist. However the father's chosen method involves the silvery grey blade he holds in his remaining palm, ready to cut the boy's neck. One certain element remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed remarkable expressive skill. Within exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a protector could betray him so completely.

He took a well-known biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to happen directly in front of the viewer

Viewing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a real countenance, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the same boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost black eyes – features in two additional works by the master. In each instance, that highly emotional face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a naked child creating chaos in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is shown as a very tangible, vividly illuminated nude figure, straddling overturned objects that include stringed devices, a music manuscript, metal armor and an architect's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – except here, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, looking with bold confidence as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master created his three portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many occasions before and render it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately before you.

However there was another side to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, just skill and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy metropolis's eye were anything but holy. What may be the very earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his red lips in a yell of agony: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber reflected in the murky waters of the transparent vase.

The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is clear: intimacy for sale.

How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was not the queer hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.

His early paintings indeed offer overt erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might look to an additional early work, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at you as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his robe.

A several annums after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a more intense, uneasy manner. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A British traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

The painter had been deceased for about 40 years when this account was recorded.