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The young boy cries out as his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering youth from the scriptural account. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the silvery grey blade he holds in his remaining hand, ready to cut the boy's throat. One certain element remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing piece demonstrated extraordinary acting skill. There exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally deep grief that a protector could betray him so completely.

The artist adopted a familiar biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to happen right in front of the viewer

Viewing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a young model, because the same boy – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost dark pupils – features in two additional paintings by the master. In every instance, that highly expressive face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on the city's alleys, his black feathery appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely real, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over objects that include musical instruments, a musical score, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Love looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Cupid depicted sightless," penned the Bard, just prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three images of the identical unusual-appearing kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a city ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately before the spectator.

However there existed another side to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's eye were everything but holy. That could be the absolute earliest hangs in London's National Gallery. A young man opens his red mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans holding flowers and, in a work destroyed in the second world war but known through photographs, the master represented a famous woman prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: sex for sale.

What are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain artistic historians improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.

His initial paintings indeed offer overt sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to another early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine gazes calmly at you as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his robe.

A few annums following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost established with important church commissions? This profane pagan god resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling way. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

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