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The young boy screams as his head is firmly held, a large digit pressing into his face as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the throat. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the tormented youth from the scriptural account. The painting appears as if Abraham, instructed by God to kill his son, could break his neck with a solitary turn. However the father's chosen approach involves the silvery grey blade he holds in his remaining hand, prepared to slit Isaac's throat. A definite aspect remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated remarkable expressive skill. There exists not only dread, shock and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

He adopted a familiar scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to happen right in front of the viewer

Standing in front of the painting, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate record of a young model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost dark pupils – appears in several other works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly expressive face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness acquired on the city's alleys, his dark plumed appendages demonic, a naked child creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often painful desire, is portrayed as a very real, vividly illuminated nude form, straddling toppled-over items that include musical instruments, a music manuscript, metal armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the gloomy disorder is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Cupid painted sightless," wrote the Bard, just prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That countenance – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the same distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.

However there was another aspect to the artist, evident as quickly as he arrived 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, only talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were anything but holy. That may be the very earliest resides in the UK's art museum. A youth opens his red mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass container.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored flower in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.

How are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex past truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some art scholars unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.

His early paintings indeed make overt sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, aligned with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to another early creation, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.

A several years following Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming almost established with prestigious church projects? This unholy non-Christian deity revives the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.

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