What was the dark-feathered god of love? What secrets this masterpiece uncovers about the rogue genius

The youthful lad screams while his head is forcefully gripped, a massive thumb pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty palm holds him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating unease through the artist's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his offspring, could break his spinal column with a single turn. Yet the father's preferred approach involves the silvery steel knife he holds in his other palm, ready to slit the boy's throat. One certain aspect stands out – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this astonishing work displayed remarkable expressive skill. Within exists not just dread, surprise and begging in his darkened eyes but additionally profound sorrow that a guardian could abandon him so completely.

He took a familiar biblical tale and transformed it so vibrant and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold directly in front of the viewer

Standing in front of the artwork, viewers identify this as a real countenance, an precise record of a young model, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost black eyes – appears in two additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly emotional visage commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the darkness while holding a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his dark plumed appendages demonic, a unclothed adolescent running chaos in a affluent residence.

Victorious Cupid, currently displayed at a British gallery, constitutes one of the most embarrassing artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with frequently agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very real, vividly illuminated nude form, straddling overturned items that comprise musical devices, a musical manuscript, metal armour and an architect's ruler. This pile of items resembles, deliberately, the geometric and construction gear strewn across the floor in the German master's print Melancholy – save in this case, the melancholic disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the turmoil he can unleash.

"Love sees not with the vision, but with the soul, / And therefore is feathered Love painted blind," penned the Bard, shortly prior to this work was created around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares straight at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with bold assurance as he struts unclothed – is the same one that shrieks in fear in Abraham's Test.

When Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three images of the same distinctive-appearing kid in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most acclaimed sacred artist in a metropolis enflamed by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was sought to adorn sanctuaries: he could take a scriptural story that had been portrayed many times before and render it so fresh, so raw and visceral that the horror seemed to be happening directly before the spectator.

However there existed another aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he arrived in the capital in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no teacher or supporter in the city, just talent and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he caught the holy city's eye were anything but devout. That could be the absolute first resides in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his red lips in a yell of agony: while reaching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has rather been attacked. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's dismal chamber mirrored in the cloudy waters of the transparent vase.

The boy wears a pink blossom in his hair – a symbol of the sex trade in Renaissance art. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma portrayed courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through images, the master represented a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her bosom. The message of all these floral indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

How are we to interpret of the artist's erotic portrayals of youths – and of one adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators since he achieved mega-fame in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the artist was not the queer hero that, for example, the filmmaker presented on film in his 1986 movie about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as some art scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial paintings do offer overt erotic suggestions, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young artist, aligned with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this idea in mind, observers might look to another initial creation, the 1596 masterwork Bacchus, in which the deity of wine stares coolly at you as he starts to undo the black ribbon of his garment.

A several years following the wine deity, what could have driven the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art patron the nobleman, when he was finally growing almost established with important ecclesiastical projects? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the erotic challenges of his initial works but in a more powerful, unsettling way. Fifty years later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about the mid-seventeenth century and was told its subject has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or assistant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.

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