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The youthful lad screams as his skull is firmly held, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful palm holds him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. It appears as if the patriarch, instructed by God to kill his son, could snap his neck with a single twist. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the metallic steel knife he grips in his other hand, prepared to slit the boy's throat. One certain element remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece demonstrated extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his shadowed gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could betray him so completely.

The artist adopted a well-known scriptural tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its horrors seemed to unfold directly in front of you

Viewing before the painting, observers recognize this as a real face, an accurate depiction of a young model, because the same youth – recognizable by his tousled hair and nearly black pupils – appears in two additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly emotional face commands the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's alleys, his dark plumed wings demonic, a unclothed child running chaos in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a London gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly lit nude figure, straddling toppled-over items that comprise musical devices, a musical manuscript, plate armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of items echoes, intentionally, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melancholy – save here, the gloomy mess is created by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And therefore is winged Love depicted sightless," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not blind. He stares straight at you. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.

When the Italian master painted his multiple images of the same distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated religious painter in a city ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could adopt a biblical story that had been depicted many times before and render it so new, so raw and physical that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately before you.

Yet there was another side to Caravaggio, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that ended 1592, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, just skill and audacity. The majority of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's attention were everything but holy. What could be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth parts his red mouth in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has rather been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the murky liquid of the transparent vase.

The boy sports a pink flower in his hair – a emblem of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Venetian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio portrayed courtesans holding flowers and, in a work lost in the second world war but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned woman courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: sex for sale.

What are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he achieved widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complex historical truth is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so completely devout that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably claim, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Christ.

His early works indeed offer explicit sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a destitute young creator, identified with Rome's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in consideration, viewers might look to another early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes calmly at the spectator as he starts to undo the black ribbon of his garment.

A few years after the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical projects? This unholy pagan god revives the erotic provocations of his early works but in a more powerful, unsettling manner. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that slept with him". The identity of this boy was Cecco.

The artist had been deceased for about 40 annums when this story was recorded.