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A youthful boy cries out as his head is forcefully held, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand holds him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the scriptural account. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a solitary turn. However the father's chosen method involves the metallic steel knife he holds in his remaining hand, ready to slit the boy's throat. A certain element stands out – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

The artist took a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so fresh and raw that its terrors appeared to unfold directly in view of you

Viewing in front of the painting, observers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a young model, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and nearly dark pupils – features in several other works by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly expressive visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed child running chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a London museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often painful desire, is shown as a very real, brightly illuminated unclothed form, standing over overturned items that include stringed devices, a musical score, plate armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – save here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this work was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three images of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a city enflamed by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted many times before and render it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately before you.

However there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a artist in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, just talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred metropolis's eye were everything but holy. What could be the very earliest resides in London's art museum. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a scream of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber reflected in the murky liquid of the transparent container.

The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master represented a renowned woman prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.

How are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complex historical reality is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial works do make overt erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional early creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.

A several years after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This profane pagan god resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a more intense, uneasy way. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.

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