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The youthful lad cries out as his head is forcefully held, a massive thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful palm holds him by the throat. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical account. It appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary twist. However the father's preferred method involves the metallic steel knife he grips in his other hand, prepared to cut the boy's throat. One certain element remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed remarkable expressive skill. Within exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but also deep grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.

He adopted a familiar biblical story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen directly in view of you

Standing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate record of a young model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost black eyes – features in two other works by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly 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 acquired on the city's alleys, his black feathery wings sinister, a naked child running chaos in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly lit nude form, straddling toppled-over objects that include musical instruments, a music score, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear strewn across the ground in the German master's engraving Melancholy – except here, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly before this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master painted his three images of the same distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious artist in a city enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many occasions before and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening directly in front of the spectator.

Yet there was another side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the sacred metropolis's eye were anything but devout. That could be the absolute first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal room reflected in the murky waters of the transparent container.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but known through images, the master represented a renowned woman prostitute, holding a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for sale.

How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His initial paintings indeed make explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to another initial work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares calmly at you as he begins to untie the dark sash of his garment.

A several years after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with prestigious church projects? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial works but in a more powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

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