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A young lad screams while his head is forcefully gripped, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his father's powerful hand holds him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the biblical account. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a single twist. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic grey blade he grips in his remaining palm, ready to slit the boy's throat. One certain aspect remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed extraordinary expressive ability. Within exists not just fear, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.

He adopted a familiar scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen directly in view of the viewer

Viewing in front of the artwork, observers recognize this as a actual face, an precise record of a adolescent model, because the identical youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly black pupils – features in two additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly emotional face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed child creating riot in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Viewers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often painful longing, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly lit nude form, straddling overturned objects that include musical devices, a music manuscript, metal armour and an architect's T-square. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save here, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, looking with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three images of the same distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many occasions previously and make it so fresh, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately before the spectator.

Yet there existed another side to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the city, just skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were everything but holy. That could be the very earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth parts his red mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the transparent container.

The boy sports a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the erotic commerce in Renaissance art. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a famous woman prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated historical reality is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as some art historians improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.

His early works indeed offer explicit sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young creator, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to an additional early creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his robe.

A several annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, uneasy way. Fifty years afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A British visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

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