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The youthful lad screams while his skull is firmly gripped, a large thumb pressing into his face as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through the artist's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his son, could snap his neck with a single twist. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his remaining palm, prepared to cut Isaac's neck. A certain aspect stands out – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed extraordinary expressive skill. There exists not only dread, shock and pleading in his darkened eyes but additionally deep sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.

He adopted a well-known scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and raw that its horrors seemed to unfold right in front of you

Viewing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual countenance, an precise depiction of a young model, because the same boy – identifiable by his tousled hair and almost dark eyes – appears in several additional paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his black feathery wings sinister, a unclothed child running riot in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is shown as a very real, brightly illuminated nude form, straddling toppled-over items that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, metal armour and an architect's ruler. This pile of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – except here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And thus is feathered Cupid painted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly before this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He gazes directly at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he struts unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple portrayals of the identical distinctive-appearing youth in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly acclaimed religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could adopt a biblical narrative that had been portrayed numerous occasions previously and render it so new, so raw and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of you.

Yet there was a different side to the artist, evident as quickly as he came in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his initial twenties with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only talent and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's attention were anything but holy. That may be the very first resides in London's art museum. A youth opens his red lips in a scream of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent container.

The adolescent sports a pink flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic trade in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Palma Vecchio depicted courtesans holding blooms and, in a work lost in the second world war but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her chest. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a question that has split his interpreters since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past reality is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on screen in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.

His early paintings indeed offer overt sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute young artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might look to an additional initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at you as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his garment.

A few annums after Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This profane non-Christian deity resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a more intense, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its hidden meaning seemed clear: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that slept with him". The identity of this adolescent was Francesco.

The artist had been deceased for about forty years when this account was recorded.