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A young boy cries out as his head is firmly held, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the throat. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented youth from the biblical account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a solitary turn. Yet the father's preferred method involves the silvery grey blade he holds in his remaining hand, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. A definite element stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated remarkable acting ability. Within exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also profound grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.

He adopted a familiar scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen directly in view of you

Standing before the painting, observers identify this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a young model, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost dark pupils – appears in several additional works by the master. In every instance, that highly expressive face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's streets, his dark feathery wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating chaos in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, straddling overturned objects that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, metal armour and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love depicted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen assurance as he poses naked – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

As the Italian master painted his multiple images of the identical distinctive-looking kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a city ignited by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed many times previously and make it so new, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring directly in front of you.

However there existed another side to the artist, apparent as soon as he came in Rome in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, just skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred metropolis's attention were anything but devout. What may be the absolute first hangs in London's art museum. A young man opens his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: observers can discern the painter's gloomy room reflected in the murky waters of the glass vase.

The adolescent sports a pink flower in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but documented through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a famous woman prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the artist was not the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial works do offer explicit sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his robe.

A few years following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming almost established with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane pagan deity resurrects the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a more powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.

The artist had been dead for about forty years when this account was recorded.