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The youthful boy cries out as his skull is forcefully held, a large digit pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical account. The painting appears as if the patriarch, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a single twist. However the father's preferred method involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his other hand, prepared to slit the boy's neck. One certain aspect remains – whomever modeled as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable acting skill. There exists not just fear, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.

He adopted a well-known scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its terrors appeared to happen right in front of you

Viewing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate record of a adolescent subject, because the identical boy – identifiable by his disheveled locks and nearly black eyes – features in two other works by Caravaggio. In every case, that richly expressive visage dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his black plumed appendages demonic, a naked child running riot in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose darts fill people with frequently painful desire, is shown as a very tangible, vividly lit unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over objects that include musical devices, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – save here, the melancholic disorder is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, just prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his three portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred painter in a city enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a biblical story that had been depicted numerous times previously and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be happening immediately in front of you.

Yet there was a different side to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, just talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy city's eye were anything but devout. That could be the very earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A young man opens his red mouth in a yell of agony: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern the painter's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in early modern painting. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding flowers and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a famous woman courtesan, holding a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: sex for sale.

What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the painter was neither the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain art scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial works do make explicit erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with Rome's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to another early work, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.

A few annums after the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly established with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy non-Christian god revives the erotic provocations of his early works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

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