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A youthful lad cries out as his head is forcefully held, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural account. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a single twist. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic steel knife he grips in his remaining palm, prepared to slit Isaac's throat. One definite element stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but also deep grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.

The artist took a well-known biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to happen right in view of you

Viewing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and nearly dark eyes – features in several other paintings by the master. In every instance, that highly emotional face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on the city's alleys, his black feathery appendages sinister, a naked child creating riot in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London museum, represents one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely real, brightly illuminated nude figure, standing over toppled-over items that include musical devices, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and construction gear strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save in this case, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love depicted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master created his three portrayals of the identical unusual-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed religious artist in a metropolis ignited by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted numerous times previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately before you.

However there existed a different side to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in Rome in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, just talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's attention were everything but holy. That may be the very first hangs in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see the painter's gloomy room mirrored in the murky waters of the glass vase.

The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work lost in the second world war but known through photographs, Caravaggio represented a famous woman courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is clear: intimacy for purchase.

How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial paintings indeed make overt erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might look to an additional initial work, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.

A several years after the wine deity, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing almost established with important ecclesiastical commissions? This profane pagan deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

The painter had been deceased for about forty years when this story was documented.