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A youthful boy screams as his head is firmly held, a large thumb pressing into his face as his father's mighty palm grasps him by the neck. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking distress through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the biblical narrative. It seems as if Abraham, instructed by God to kill his offspring, could snap his neck with a single twist. Yet Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic steel blade he grips in his remaining hand, ready to slit the boy's neck. One certain element remains – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing piece displayed remarkable expressive skill. Within exists not only fear, shock and pleading in his darkened gaze but additionally deep grief that a protector could betray him so completely.

He took a familiar biblical story and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold directly in front of you

Viewing in front of the artwork, observers identify this as a actual countenance, an accurate depiction of a young subject, because the identical boy – identifiable by his tousled locks and almost black eyes – appears in two other paintings by the master. In every case, that richly emotional visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he smirks with a toughness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black plumed appendages sinister, a naked child creating chaos in a well-to-do residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently exhibited at a British gallery, represents one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. Cupid, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a extremely real, vividly lit nude form, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise musical instruments, a music manuscript, metal armour and an builder's ruler. This heap of items echoes, deliberately, the geometric and construction equipment strewn across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – save in this case, the gloomy disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can release.

"Love looks not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love depicted blind," penned Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was produced around 1601. But the painter's god is not blind. He stares directly at you. That face – ironic and ruddy-faced, staring with brazen assurance as he poses naked – is the identical one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the identical distinctive-appearing kid in the Eternal City at the start of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed religious artist in a city ignited by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was sought to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been depicted numerous occasions before and make it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror seemed to be happening directly before you.

However there existed a different aspect to Caravaggio, evident as quickly as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that concluded 1592, as a artist in his initial 20s with no teacher or supporter in the urban center, only skill and audacity. Most of the works with which he caught the holy city's attention were anything but holy. What may be the very first resides in London's art museum. A youth opens his crimson lips in a yell of agony: while stretching out his filthy digits for a cherry, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: viewers can see the painter's dismal room reflected in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.

The boy wears a pink flower in his coiffure – a symbol of the sex trade in early modern painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma portrayed prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the second world war but documented through images, Caravaggio represented a famous female courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The meaning of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for sale.

How are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of youths – and of one boy in particular? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical reality is that the painter was not the homosexual hero that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain art historians unbelievably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is actually a likeness of Jesus.

His initial works do offer explicit erotic suggestions, or even propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with Rome's sex workers, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, viewers might look to an additional early work, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of wine gazes coolly at you as he begins to undo the black ribbon of his garment.

A several annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to paint Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last becoming nearly respectable with prestigious church commissions? This profane pagan god revives the erotic provocations of his early paintings but in a increasingly intense, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller saw the painting in about 1649 and was informed its figure has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The identity of this boy was Francesco.

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