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A youthful lad screams as his skull is forcefully held, a large digit pressing into his face as his father's powerful hand holds him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the suffering child from the biblical account. The painting appears as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a single turn. Yet the father's preferred method involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his other hand, ready to slit Isaac's neck. One definite element stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable acting skill. There exists not only fear, shock and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

He adopted a well-known biblical tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold directly in front of you

Standing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual face, an accurate record of a adolescent subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and nearly black pupils – appears in several additional works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly expressive face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his black plumed wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a London gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a very real, vividly lit unclothed form, standing over overturned items that comprise stringed instruments, a music manuscript, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted blind," penned the Bard, just before this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he poses naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three images of the identical distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed numerous occasions before and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.

Yet there was another side to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, only talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were anything but devout. 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 dirty digits for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through photographs, the master represented a famous female courtesan, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for sale.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain art historians unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His early works indeed offer explicit sexual suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with the city's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to another early work, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.

A several annums after Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly established with important church projects? This profane pagan deity revives the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

The artist had been dead for about forty years when this story was documented.