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A young boy cries out as his head is forcefully held, a massive thumb digging into his face as his parent's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. That moment from The Sacrifice of Isaac appears in the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through the artist's harrowing portrayal of the suffering youth from the biblical narrative. The painting appears as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his son, could snap his spinal column with a solitary twist. Yet the father's chosen approach involves the silvery steel blade he grips in his other palm, prepared to slit the boy's throat. One definite element remains – whoever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking work displayed remarkable expressive ability. There exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally profound grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

He took a familiar scriptural story and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen right in front of the viewer

Standing before the artwork, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an precise record of a young subject, because the same youth – recognizable by his disheveled hair and nearly dark pupils – appears in several other paintings by Caravaggio. In each instance, that highly expressive face dominates the scene. In John the Baptist, he gazes mischievously from the shadows while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness learned on the city's streets, his black plumed appendages sinister, a naked adolescent running chaos in a affluent dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely unsettled gazing at it. Cupid, whose arrows inspire people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, brightly lit nude figure, standing over toppled-over objects that comprise musical devices, a music score, plate armour and an architect's T-square. This heap of possessions resembles, deliberately, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melencolia I – save here, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Love painted sightless," wrote the Bard, just before this painting was created around 1601. But the painter's god is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That countenance – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with bold assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the identical distinctive-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed sacred painter in a city enflamed by religious revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn churches: he could take a biblical narrative that had been portrayed many occasions previously and make it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the terror seemed to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.

Yet there was another side to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in Rome in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no teacher or patron in the urban center, just talent and boldness. Most of the works with which he caught the sacred city's attention were everything but holy. That may be the absolute first resides in the UK's art museum. A young man opens his crimson mouth in a scream of pain: while reaching out his dirty digits for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can see the painter's gloomy room reflected in the murky liquid of the glass container.

The boy sports a pink blossom in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern painting. Venetian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes grasping flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through photographs, the master portrayed a famous female courtesan, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: sex for sale.

What are we to make of the artist's sensual portrayals of youths – and of a particular boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has split his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complicated past truth is that the artist was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, the filmmaker put on screen in his 1986 movie Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art historians improbably assert, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Christ.

His initial paintings do make explicit erotic implications, or including propositions. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, identified with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, observers might look to an additional early work, the 1596 masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark sash of his garment.

A several years following Bacchus, what could have driven Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing almost respectable with important ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan deity revives the erotic challenges of his initial paintings but in a more powerful, uneasy manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's companion. A British visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or assistant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

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