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A young lad screams as his head is firmly held, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his father's mighty hand holds him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the biblical account. It appears as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his son, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. However Abraham's preferred method involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to slit Isaac's throat. A definite aspect stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary acting skill. Within exists not only fear, shock and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a protector could betray him so completely.

The artist adopted a well-known scriptural story and made it so fresh and raw that its horrors seemed to happen right in view of you

Viewing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a real face, an precise record of a young subject, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost dark eyes – features in two additional works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly emotional visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his black feathery wings sinister, a unclothed child creating riot in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful desire, is portrayed as a very tangible, brightly lit unclothed form, standing over toppled-over items that comprise musical devices, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind," penned Shakespeare, shortly prior to this work was created around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares straight at you. That face – ironic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.

As the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-looking kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many times before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring directly before you.

Yet there was a different side to the artist, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, just talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred metropolis's attention were anything but devout. What may be the very earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the murky liquid of the transparent container.

The boy wears a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio represented a famous woman courtesan, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: sex for purchase.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual 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 twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the painter was not the homosexual icon that, for instance, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some artistic scholars improbably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His early paintings indeed offer explicit erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, viewers might turn to another initial work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his garment.

A few annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy non-Christian deity revives the sexual provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The identity of this adolescent was Cecco.

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