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The youthful lad cries out as his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural account. It seems as if the patriarch, instructed by God to kill his son, could snap his spinal column with a single turn. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his remaining palm, prepared to slit the boy's neck. One definite aspect remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable acting ability. Within exists not just dread, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally deep grief that a guardian could betray him so completely.

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

Viewing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate record of a young subject, because the same youth – identifiable by his disheveled locks and nearly dark eyes – features in two other paintings by Caravaggio. In every case, that richly expressive visage commands the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while holding a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness learned on the city's streets, his dark plumed appendages sinister, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, currently exhibited at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Viewers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing desire, is shown as a extremely real, vividly lit unclothed figure, standing over overturned items that comprise musical devices, a music manuscript, metal armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in the German master's engraving Melancholy – except in this case, the melancholic disorder is created by this smirking Cupid and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Love sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares directly at you. That face – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with bold assurance as he struts naked – is the identical one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted his multiple images of the identical unusual-appearing youth in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred artist in a city enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a biblical story that had been portrayed numerous occasions before and make it so new, so unfiltered and visceral that the terror appeared to be occurring immediately before the spectator.

Yet there existed a different aspect to Caravaggio, apparent as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that ended the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the city, only talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred city's eye were anything but devout. That could be the absolute first hangs in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his red lips in a scream of agony: while stretching out his dirty fingers for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is eroticism amid poverty: viewers can discern the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the cloudy liquid of the glass vase.

The boy wears a rose-colored blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian artists such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through photographs, Caravaggio portrayed a renowned female prostitute, clutching a posy to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for sale.

How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has split his interpreters ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated past truth is that the artist was neither the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his 1986 film Caravaggio, nor so entirely devout that, as some art historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His early paintings indeed make explicit erotic implications, or even offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might turn to another initial creation, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes coolly at the spectator as he starts to untie the dark ribbon of his garment.

A few annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated the artist to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming almost respectable with important ecclesiastical projects? This unholy pagan god resurrects the erotic provocations of his initial works but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a portrait of Caravaggio's lover. A English visitor saw Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was informed its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] own boy or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Francesco.

The painter had been dead for about forty years when this account was documented.