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A youthful boy screams as his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the throat. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a single twist. Yet the father's preferred method involves the metallic steel blade he grips in his other palm, prepared to cut the boy's throat. One definite aspect remains – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. Within exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally deep grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

The artist took a familiar scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to unfold right in view of you

Standing before the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate record of a adolescent subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and nearly dark pupils – features in several other works by the master. In each case, that highly emotional face commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his black feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a extremely real, vividly illuminated nude figure, standing over toppled-over objects that include musical devices, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in the German master's print Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can release.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Love painted sightless," wrote the Bard, shortly prior to this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with bold confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master painted his three portrayals of the same distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly acclaimed religious artist in a city ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been depicted numerous occasions previously and render it so new, so unfiltered and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring immediately before you.

Yet there existed a different side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, just skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the sacred city's attention were anything but devout. That may be the very first resides in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his red lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy chamber reflected in the murky liquid of the glass vase.

The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned female courtesan, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.

What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical reality is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His early works indeed offer explicit sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, identified with Rome's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might look to another early work, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he starts to undo the dark sash of his robe.

A few years following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the art collector the nobleman, when he was at last growing almost established with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane pagan deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a more intense, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

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