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The young boy screams as his skull is firmly gripped, a large digit pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful hand holds him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a single turn. Yet the father's chosen method involves the silvery steel knife he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. A definite aspect remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. There exists not just fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

He took a familiar biblical story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold right in view of you

Standing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an precise depiction of a young model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled locks and almost dark eyes – features in two additional paintings by the master. In each case, that richly expressive visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his black feathery appendages demonic, a naked child running chaos in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated unclothed form, straddling toppled-over objects that include stringed instruments, a music manuscript, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the melancholic mess is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted sightless," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes directly at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three images of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred painter in a city enflamed by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed many times previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of the spectator.

However there was a different aspect to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, just talent and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's attention were everything but holy. That may be the absolute earliest hangs in London's National Gallery. A young man parts his red mouth in a yell of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see the painter's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass container.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned female prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is clear: sex for purchase.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 film about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.

His initial works indeed offer explicit sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might look to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark sash of his garment.

A few annums following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost established with prestigious church 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 hidden meaning seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

The painter had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was recorded.