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The youthful lad cries out as his skull is firmly held, a large thumb digging into his face as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a solitary twist. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his remaining hand, prepared to slit the boy's neck. One certain element remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary acting skill. Within exists not just fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

He adopted a well-known scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen right in front of you

Viewing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a young model, because the same youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost dark eyes – features in several other paintings by the master. In every instance, that richly expressive face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his black feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed child creating riot in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very tangible, vividly lit nude form, standing over overturned items that include musical devices, a music manuscript, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – save here, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the identical unusual-looking kid in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed religious painter in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been depicted many occasions before and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring immediately before you.

However there was another side to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, just skill and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's attention were everything but holy. That could be the absolute earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room reflected in the murky liquid of the glass container.

The boy sports a rose-colored flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic trade in early modern art. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned female prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for purchase.

What are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past reality is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain art scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His initial paintings do make explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might turn to another early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.

A few annums following the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly established with important church commissions? This unholy non-Christian god revives the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A British visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.

The artist had been dead for about 40 annums when this story was recorded.