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The youthful lad screams while his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb digging into his cheek as his father's mighty hand holds him by the neck. That scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through the artist's chilling rendition of the tormented child from the scriptural account. It seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could snap his neck with a single turn. However Abraham's chosen method involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his remaining palm, ready to slit the boy's throat. A certain element remains – whomever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed extraordinary acting skill. There exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but additionally profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so utterly.

The artist adopted a familiar scriptural tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors seemed to unfold right in front of the viewer

Standing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise record of a young subject, because the identical youth – recognizable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark eyes – features in several additional works by the master. In every case, that highly expressive face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness acquired on Rome's streets, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a naked adolescent running riot in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently displayed at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated nude figure, standing over overturned items that comprise stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an architect's ruler. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the melancholic disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is feathered Love painted blind," wrote the Bard, shortly before this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He stares straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and ruddy-cheeked, looking with bold assurance as he poses naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images 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 ignited by Catholic revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a biblical story that had been portrayed many occasions before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be happening directly in front of the spectator.

Yet there existed a different side to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no teacher or patron in the urban center, only skill and boldness. Most of the works with which he captured the sacred city's eye were anything but holy. That could be the absolute earliest hangs in London's National Gallery. A youth opens his red mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: viewers can see the painter's dismal room reflected in the cloudy liquid of the transparent vase.

The boy wears a pink blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in early modern art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these botanical signifiers is clear: intimacy for purchase.

How are we to interpret of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of a particular adolescent in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters ever since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex past reality is that the artist was neither the queer hero that, for example, Derek Jarman put on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some art scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.

His initial works do offer explicit erotic suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this idea in mind, observers might turn to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterwork the god of wine, in which the god of wine stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark sash of his robe.

A few years after Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron the nobleman, when he was at last growing nearly established with prestigious church commissions? This profane pagan deity revives the sexual challenges of his early paintings but in a more intense, uneasy way. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A British visitor viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

The painter had been deceased for about forty annums when this story was documented.