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A youthful boy cries out while his head is firmly gripped, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful palm holds him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural account. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his other palm, prepared to slit the boy's throat. One certain aspect remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work displayed remarkable acting skill. There exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.

He took a well-known biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold right in view of you

Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost black eyes – appears in two other works by Caravaggio. In every case, that richly emotional visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black plumed wings demonic, a naked child running chaos in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely real, brightly lit unclothed form, standing over overturned objects that include stringed devices, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear strewn across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – except in this case, 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 feathered Love depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just before this work was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master created his three portrayals of the identical unusual-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many occasions previously and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring directly before you.

However there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, just talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's attention were everything but holy. That may be the absolute earliest hangs in London's art museum. A youth opens his red mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the murky waters of the transparent container.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through images, the master portrayed a renowned female prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for purchase.

How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was not the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His initial paintings indeed make explicit sexual suggestions, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with the city's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might look to another early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at you as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.

A several annums after the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly established with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy non-Christian god resurrects the sexual provocations of his early works but in a more intense, uneasy way. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

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