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A young lad cries out as his skull is firmly held, a massive digit pressing into his face as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented youth from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a solitary turn. However the father's preferred approach involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his remaining hand, prepared to slit Isaac's throat. One definite aspect stands out – whoever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not just fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally deep grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

He took a familiar biblical tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold right in front of the viewer

Viewing in front of the painting, observers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark eyes – appears in two other paintings by the master. In every case, that richly expressive visage dominates the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his dark plumed wings demonic, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.

Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated nude figure, standing over overturned objects that comprise stringed instruments, a musical score, plate armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Love sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Love depicted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three images of the same unusual-appearing youth in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed numerous times previously and make it so fresh, so raw and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring directly in front of you.

Yet there was another side to the artist, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the holy city's eye were anything but holy. That could be the very first resides in London's art museum. A young man parts his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent vase.

The boy wears a pink blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through images, the master portrayed a renowned female prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for purchase.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His early paintings indeed offer explicit sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, aligned with the city's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to another early work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes calmly at the spectator as he begins to untie the black ribbon of his garment.

A few years after Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with prestigious church commissions? This profane pagan god resurrects the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a more intense, uneasy way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

The painter had been dead for about forty years when this account was documented.