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The youthful lad cries out while his skull is firmly gripped, a large thumb digging into his face as his father's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the suffering child from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if the patriarch, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could snap his spinal column with a single twist. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery grey blade he grips in his other palm, ready to slit the boy's neck. A definite element stands out – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed extraordinary acting skill. Within exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also profound grief that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

He took a well-known scriptural story and transformed it so vibrant and raw that its horrors appeared to happen directly in view of the viewer

Viewing in front of the painting, observers identify this as a actual face, an precise record of a young subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost dark pupils – appears in several additional paintings by the master. In every instance, that richly emotional face commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on the city's streets, his black feathery wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most embarrassing artworks ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing longing, is portrayed as a very real, brightly illuminated nude figure, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise stringed devices, a musical score, plate armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the floor in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic mess is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Love looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Cupid painted blind," wrote the Bard, just before this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold confidence as he poses naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the identical unusual-looking kid in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed numerous times previously and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring directly in front of you.

However there was another side to the artist, apparent as quickly as he came in Rome in the cold season that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the city, just skill and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's attention were everything but holy. That may be the very first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see Caravaggio's gloomy room mirrored in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.

The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through photographs, the master represented a famous woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for purchase.

How are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of youths – and of one adolescent in particular? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His early paintings indeed make overt erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, identified with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the god of alcohol gazes calmly at you as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his garment.

A few years following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing almost established with important church projects? This unholy pagan god revives the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's companion. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

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