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The youthful boy screams as his skull is forcefully held, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand holds him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural account. It seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. However Abraham's preferred method involves the metallic steel knife he grips in his other palm, prepared to cut the boy's throat. A certain aspect remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not just fear, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but also profound sorrow that a protector could betray him so completely.

He adopted a well-known biblical story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors appeared to happen directly in front of the viewer

Viewing before the painting, observers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate record of a young subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly black pupils – appears in two other paintings by the master. In every instance, that highly expressive visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on the city's alleys, his dark plumed wings demonic, a unclothed child running chaos in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly lit unclothed figure, standing over overturned objects that comprise musical devices, a musical score, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – save here, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted blind," penned the Bard, just before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with bold assurance as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the identical unusual-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a city ignited by religious revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous times previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of you.

However there existed another side to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred city's eye were everything but holy. What may be the very earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass container.

The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned female courtesan, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.

How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a question that has split his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the artist was not the homosexual hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain art historians improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.

His initial works indeed make overt erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, viewers might look to an additional initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.

A few years after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the art collector the nobleman, when he was at last becoming almost established with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan god resurrects the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

The painter had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was documented.