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The youthful lad cries out as his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his face as his father's mighty palm holds him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the scriptural account. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by God to kill his son, could break his neck with a single twist. However the father's chosen method involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his remaining hand, ready to slit the boy's throat. One certain element remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated extraordinary acting ability. There exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.

He took a well-known scriptural story and transformed it so fresh and raw that its terrors seemed to unfold right in view of you

Standing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a young subject, because the same youth – recognizable by his disheveled hair and almost black pupils – features in several additional works by the master. In every instance, that highly emotional visage dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a toughness acquired on the city's alleys, his black feathery wings demonic, a unclothed child creating riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a extremely real, brightly illuminated nude figure, standing over overturned items that include stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the gloomy mess is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love depicted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not unseeing. He gazes straight at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he poses naked – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the same unusual-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many times before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror seemed to be occurring directly before you.

However there existed another aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only talent and boldness. The majority of the works with which he captured the sacred city's attention were anything but holy. That could be the very first resides in London's art museum. A young man opens his red lips in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: observers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass container.

The boy sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through images, the master portrayed a renowned female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for sale.

What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of one boy in particular? 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 film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.

His early paintings do offer explicit erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might look to another initial work, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes calmly at you as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.

A few years after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost established with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan deity revives the sexual challenges of his early works but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A British visitor viewed the painting 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 adolescent was Francesco.

The painter had been dead for about 40 years when this story was recorded.