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The young lad screams as his skull is firmly gripped, a massive digit pressing into his face as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented youth from the scriptural narrative. The painting appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a single twist. However the father's chosen approach involves the silvery steel knife he holds in his remaining hand, prepared to slit the boy's neck. A certain element stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable expressive skill. Within exists not just fear, shock and begging in his darkened gaze but also deep grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

He took a well-known scriptural tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold right in view of you

Viewing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a adolescent subject, because the same youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and almost black pupils – features in two additional works by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly expressive face commands the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's alleys, his dark plumed wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed form, straddling toppled-over items that include stringed instruments, a music score, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the melancholic mess is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Love painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes straight at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

As the Italian master created his multiple images of the same unusual-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a biblical story that had been depicted many occasions previously and make it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring directly before the spectator.

However there existed another side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, only skill and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's eye were anything but holy. That may be the absolute earliest resides in London's art museum. A youth parts his red lips in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's dismal room mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in early modern painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio portrayed prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work lost in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for purchase.

How are we to make of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as some art historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a portrait of Jesus.

His early paintings indeed make overt sexual suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, observers might turn to an additional initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black ribbon of his garment.

A several years after the wine deity, what could have motivated the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally becoming nearly established with important church projects? This profane pagan god revives the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy manner. Fifty years later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A British traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.

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