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A youthful lad screams while his skull is firmly held, a large digit digging into his cheek as his father's mighty hand holds him by the throat. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through Caravaggio's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by the Divine to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. However the father's preferred approach involves the silvery steel knife he grips in his other hand, prepared to cut the boy's throat. A certain aspect stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed remarkable expressive skill. There exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed eyes but additionally profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

The artist adopted a well-known biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold right in view of the viewer

Standing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an accurate record of a young subject, because the identical boy – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly black eyes – appears in two additional works by the master. In each case, that highly expressive face commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his black feathery appendages demonic, a naked adolescent creating chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a London gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with often painful desire, is shown as a extremely real, vividly lit nude figure, straddling overturned objects that include stringed devices, a music manuscript, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholy – except here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Love sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love painted sightless," wrote the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at you. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he struts naked – is the identical one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-looking kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred artist in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted many times before and make it so new, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be happening directly in front of the spectator.

However there was a different side to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, just talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he caught the holy metropolis's attention were anything but devout. What may be the very first resides in London's art museum. A youth parts his red lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's dismal chamber reflected in the murky waters of the transparent container.

The adolescent sports a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past reality is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some artistic scholars improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His initial works do offer explicit sexual suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, viewers might turn to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at you as he starts to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.

A several annums after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with prestigious church projects? This unholy pagan god resurrects the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's companion. A British visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject 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 deceased for about forty years when this story was documented.