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A young boy screams while his skull is forcefully held, a large digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand holds him by the throat. This scene from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a solitary turn. Yet the father's chosen method involves the metallic steel blade he holds in his remaining palm, prepared to cut the boy's throat. One definite aspect remains – whomever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed extraordinary acting skill. There exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also profound grief that a guardian could abandon him so completely.

He adopted a familiar scriptural story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its terrors appeared to happen right in view of the viewer

Viewing before the painting, observers recognize this as a real face, an precise depiction of a adolescent model, because the same youth – identifiable by his tousled hair and almost black eyes – appears in several other paintings by the master. In each instance, that highly emotional visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a hardness learned on Rome's alleys, his black feathery appendages sinister, a unclothed child creating chaos in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently painful desire, is portrayed as a very real, vividly illuminated nude figure, standing over toppled-over items that include musical instruments, a music score, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and construction equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancholy – save here, the gloomy disorder is created by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted sightless," wrote the Bard, shortly prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That face – ironic and ruddy-cheeked, staring with bold assurance as he poses naked – is the same one that screams in fear in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

When the Italian master created his three images of the same unusual-looking kid in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated religious artist in a city ignited by religious renewal. Abraham's Offering demonstrates why he was sought to decorate churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been depicted many times previously and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring immediately in front of you.

Yet there existed another side to the artist, evident as soon as he came in Rome in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a painter in his early 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the holy metropolis's eye were anything but devout. What may be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his crimson mouth in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.

The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the erotic commerce in early modern painting. Venetian artists such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through photographs, the master represented a famous female courtesan, holding a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to interpret of the artist's erotic depictions of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a inquiry that has split his interpreters since he gained mega-fame in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was not the homosexual icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman presented on screen in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic scholars unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His early works do offer overt erotic suggestions, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, viewers might turn to an additional initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol gazes coolly at the spectator as he begins to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.

A several years after Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing almost respectable with prestigious church commissions? This profane pagan god revives the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

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