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The youthful lad cries out as his head is firmly gripped, a large thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural account. The painting seems as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the metallic grey blade he holds in his other hand, prepared to cut the boy's neck. One definite aspect stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work demonstrated remarkable acting ability. There exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his shadowed gaze but also profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.

The artist took a familiar biblical story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold right in view of the viewer

Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a adolescent model, because the same youth – recognizable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark eyes – features in two other works by the master. In every case, that richly expressive face commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black plumed appendages sinister, a naked child creating riot in a well-to-do dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel completely unsettled looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently painful longing, is shown as a extremely real, brightly lit nude figure, straddling overturned items that comprise musical instruments, a music score, metal armour and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, intentionally, the mathematical and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save here, the melancholic mess is caused by this grinning deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is winged Cupid painted sightless," penned the Bard, just prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not blind. He gazes straight at the observer. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with brazen confidence as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in terror in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the same distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed sacred painter in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been depicted many occasions previously and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring directly before the spectator.

However there existed another side to the artist, apparent as quickly as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a artist in his initial twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, just talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred city's attention were everything but devout. What may be the absolute first hangs in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his crimson lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky liquid of the glass container.

The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio represented a famous woman prostitute, holding a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for purchase.

How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the painter was neither the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some art scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.

His initial paintings do make explicit erotic implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to another initial creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his garment.

A few annums following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly respectable with important church commissions? This profane pagan god revives the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a increasingly intense, uneasy way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A British traveller viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

The painter had been deceased for about 40 years when this account was documented.