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The youthful boy cries out as his head is firmly held, a large thumb digging into his face as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural account. It appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a single twist. However the father's preferred approach involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his other hand, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. A definite aspect remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary acting skill. Within exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.

The artist took a familiar biblical story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen right in view of the viewer

Viewing before the painting, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an precise record of a young subject, because the same youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly dark eyes – appears in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly emotional visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his dark feathery wings demonic, a naked adolescent creating riot in a affluent dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly lit nude form, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise stringed devices, a musical score, plate armor and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear scattered across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the melancholic disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Love depicted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.

As the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted many times before and make it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.

Yet there existed a different side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, only talent and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the holy metropolis's eye were everything but holy. What could be the very earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his red mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.

The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman courtesan, holding a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.

What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the artist was not the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as some artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His early paintings do offer overt erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless 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 initial work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares calmly at you as he begins to untie the black sash of his garment.

A several annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with important church projects? This unholy non-Christian god revives the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, uneasy way. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

The artist had been dead for about 40 years when this story was documented.