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A young boy screams as his head is firmly gripped, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical narrative. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by God to kill his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single turn. However the father's chosen method involves the silvery steel knife he holds in his remaining palm, ready to cut the boy's throat. A certain aspect remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work demonstrated remarkable acting skill. There exists not only dread, surprise and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally deep grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.

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

Viewing in front of the artwork, viewers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate depiction of a adolescent subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled hair and almost dark pupils – appears in several additional paintings by the master. In each case, that richly expressive face dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his black plumed wings sinister, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed figure, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise stringed instruments, a musical score, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Love painted blind," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares directly at you. That face – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As the Italian master painted his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a city ignited by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been depicted many occasions before and render it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the horror appeared to be happening immediately in front of the spectator.

However there existed a different side to the artist, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that ended 1592, as a artist in his early twenties with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the holy city's eye were everything but holy. What could be the absolute earliest resides in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the glass vase.

The adolescent sports a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in early modern art. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work destroyed in the WWII but known through images, the master portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for sale.

What are we to make of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on screen in his twentieth-century movie Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as some artistic historians improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial works indeed make explicit sexual suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless young creator, identified with the city's sex workers, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to an additional initial work, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of wine stares calmly at the spectator as he starts to untie the black sash of his robe.

A few annums following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost established with prestigious church commissions? This unholy pagan god resurrects the erotic challenges of his early paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy way. Half a century afterwards, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A British traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 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 Cecco.

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