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A youthful lad cries out as his head is firmly gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his father's mighty hand holds him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a single turn. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his other hand, prepared to cut the boy's neck. A certain element stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed extraordinary acting ability. There exists not only fear, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but also profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

He adopted a familiar scriptural tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors seemed to unfold right in view of the viewer

Viewing before the painting, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark pupils – appears in two other works by Caravaggio. In each case, that richly emotional face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness acquired on the city's alleys, his black feathery wings demonic, a unclothed child creating chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a London museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a very tangible, brightly lit nude form, straddling toppled-over items that include musical instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an architect's ruler. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural gear strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love depicted sightless," penned Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous times previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.

Yet there existed another side to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, only skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred city's eye were everything but devout. What may be the very first resides in London's art museum. A youth parts his red lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the murky liquid of the glass container.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: intimacy for sale.

How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.

His early works do make overt sexual implications, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, viewers might turn to another early work, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black sash of his robe.

A several years following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly established with prestigious church projects? This unholy non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a more intense, uneasy manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.

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