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A youthful lad cries out while his head is forcefully gripped, a large digit digging into his face as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. This moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through the artist's chilling rendition of the tormented youth from the biblical narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could break his neck with a solitary twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the silvery grey blade he holds in his other hand, prepared to cut Isaac's throat. A certain aspect stands out – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable acting skill. There exists not only dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but additionally profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

He adopted a familiar scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold right in front of the viewer

Viewing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate record of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his tousled locks and almost dark eyes – features in two other works by the master. In every case, that richly expressive face commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome's streets, his dark feathery wings sinister, a unclothed child creating riot in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, vividly illuminated unclothed figure, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise musical devices, a musical manuscript, metal armor and an builder's T-square. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in the German master's engraving Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic disorder is caused by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love depicted blind," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen confidence as he poses unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master created his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most celebrated religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate sanctuaries: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring directly before the spectator.

Yet there existed another aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, just talent and boldness. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the holy metropolis's attention were everything but holy. What could be the very earliest hangs in London's art museum. A young man parts his red mouth in a scream of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern Caravaggio's dismal chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the transparent container.

The adolescent wears a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern art. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting destroyed in the WWII but documented through images, the master portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.

What are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as certain art scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.

His early paintings indeed make overt sexual suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with the city's sex workers, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, viewers might turn to another early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.

A few years following the wine deity, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost respectable with prestigious church projects? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a more intense, unsettling way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A British traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

The painter had been dead for about 40 annums when this story was documented.