What exactly was the black-winged deity of love? The insights this masterpiece reveals about the rebellious genius

The young lad screams while his head is firmly gripped, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's mighty hand grasps him by the throat. This scene from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's harrowing rendition of the suffering child from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by God to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary twist. Yet Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery grey knife he holds in his other hand, prepared to slit Isaac's neck. A definite aspect remains – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece demonstrated remarkable expressive ability. Within exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his shadowed eyes but also 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 terrors seemed to happen right in view of you

Standing before the painting, viewers identify this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the identical boy – recognizable by his disheveled locks and almost dark pupils – appears in two other works by Caravaggio. In every instance, that richly emotional face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he peers playfully from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a hardness acquired on Rome's alleys, his black feathery appendages sinister, a naked child creating chaos in a affluent residence.

Amor Vincit Omnia, currently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most embarrassing masterpieces ever painted. Observers feel completely disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows fill people with often agonizing desire, is portrayed as a very real, brightly lit unclothed figure, standing over toppled-over items that include stringed instruments, a musical manuscript, plate armor and an architect's ruler. This heap of possessions resembles, intentionally, the geometric and architectural gear scattered across the ground in the German master's print Melencolia I – except here, the melancholic disorder is caused by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can release.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the soul, / And thus is winged Love painted blind," wrote Shakespeare, shortly prior to this painting was produced around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not blind. He gazes directly at you. That face – sardonic and ruddy-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 three images of the same unusual-looking kid in Rome at the start of the 17th century, he was the highly celebrated religious painter in a metropolis enflamed by religious renewal. 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 new, so raw and physical that the horror appeared to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.

Yet there was a different aspect to Caravaggio, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the cold season that concluded the sixteenth century, as a artist in his early 20s with no mentor or supporter in the city, only talent and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the sacred city's attention were anything but holy. That may be the very earliest resides in London's art museum. A youth opens his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his filthy fingers for a cherry, he has rather been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid squalor: observers can discern Caravaggio's dismal room mirrored in the cloudy waters of the glass vase.

The boy sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted courtesans holding blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio represented a renowned female prostitute, holding a posy to her chest. The message of all these botanical indicators is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the painter was neither the queer icon that, for instance, Derek Jarman put on film in his twentieth-century movie about the artist, nor so entirely pious that, as some artistic scholars improbably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is in fact a portrait of Jesus.

His early paintings indeed make explicit sexual suggestions, or even offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless young creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to survive. In the Uffizi, with this thought in mind, observers might turn to an additional early work, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the god of alcohol stares calmly 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 Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing nearly respectable with prestigious church projects? This profane non-Christian god resurrects the sexual challenges of his early works but in a increasingly intense, uneasy way. Half a century afterwards, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of the painter's lover. A English visitor viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

The painter had been dead for about 40 annums when this story was recorded.