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A young lad cries out while his skull is forcefully held, a large digit pressing into his cheek as his father's powerful palm holds him by the neck. That scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. It appears as if Abraham, instructed by the Divine to kill his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the metallic grey knife he holds in his other palm, ready to slit the boy's throat. One definite element remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece demonstrated remarkable acting skill. Within exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but also profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so utterly.

He adopted a well-known scriptural story and made it so fresh and raw that its horrors appeared to happen right in view of you

Standing before the painting, observers identify this as a actual face, an precise record of a young model, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled hair and nearly dark eyes – appears in several other works by Caravaggio. In each instance, that richly expressive visage commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed appendages demonic, a naked adolescent creating riot in a affluent dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel totally unsettled looking at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often painful longing, is shown as a very real, vividly illuminated nude figure, standing over toppled-over items that include musical devices, a musical score, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the mathematical and construction equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the melancholic disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Cupid painted sightless," wrote the Bard, shortly prior to this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That countenance – sardonic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he poses naked – is the same one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed religious artist in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate sanctuaries: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been depicted many times previously and render it so fresh, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring directly before the spectator.

However there existed a different aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, just talent and audacity. Most of the works with which he captured the holy city's attention were anything but holy. That could be the very earliest hangs in London's art museum. A young man opens his crimson lips in a yell of pain: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent container.

The boy wears a rose-colored flower in his hair – a emblem of the erotic trade in Renaissance art. Venetian artists such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio represented a famous female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.

What are we to interpret of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he gained mega-fame in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the painter was neither the homosexual hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain art scholars unbelievably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.

His early works indeed offer overt sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, observers might turn to an additional initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterwork Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at you as he starts to undo the black sash of his robe.

A several annums after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector the nobleman, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his initial paintings but in a more intense, uneasy way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A British visitor viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

The artist had been deceased for about 40 years when this story was documented.