Who was the black-winged deity of desire? The secrets that masterpiece reveals about the rebellious artist

The youthful lad cries out while his skull is forcefully held, a large digit digging into his face as his parent's powerful hand grasps him by the throat. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice appears in the Uffizi Gallery, creating distress through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the suffering child from the scriptural account. It seems as if the patriarch, instructed by God to sacrifice his son, could break his spinal column with a solitary twist. However Abraham's chosen approach involves the metallic steel knife he grips in his other palm, prepared to slit the boy's throat. One definite aspect stands out – whomever posed as the sacrifice for this astonishing piece displayed remarkable expressive skill. Within exists not just fear, surprise and pleading in his shadowed eyes but additionally profound sorrow that a protector could betray him so completely.

He adopted a well-known biblical tale and made it so vibrant and visceral that its horrors appeared to unfold directly in front of you

Viewing in front of the painting, viewers recognize this as a actual countenance, an precise record of a adolescent subject, because the identical youth – identifiable by his disheveled hair and almost dark eyes – features in two other works by Caravaggio. In every case, that highly emotional visage dominates the composition. In Youth With a Ram, he gazes mischievously from the darkness while embracing a ram. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he grins with a hardness acquired on Rome's streets, his black feathery appendages sinister, a naked adolescent running riot in a affluent dwelling.

Victorious Cupid, presently displayed at a London museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting masterpieces ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts inspire people with often painful longing, is shown as a extremely tangible, brightly illuminated unclothed form, straddling overturned items that comprise stringed devices, a musical score, metal armor and an builder's ruler. This pile of items resembles, intentionally, the geometric and construction gear scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's print Melencolia I – except in this case, the melancholic disorder is created by this grinning Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.

"Affection looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Love painted blind," penned Shakespeare, shortly before this painting was created around the early 1600s. But the painter's Cupid is not unseeing. He stares directly at you. That countenance – ironic and rosy-faced, looking with brazen assurance as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that screams in fear in Abraham's Test.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his multiple images of the same unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the most celebrated religious artist in a metropolis ignited by religious revival. The Sacrifice of Isaac demonstrates why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural narrative that had been portrayed many occasions previously and render it so new, so raw and physical that the terror seemed to be happening immediately before you.

Yet there was another aspect to the artist, evident as soon as he came in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early twenties with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, just skill and boldness. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred metropolis's attention were anything but holy. That could be the very earliest resides in London's National Gallery. A youth parts his red mouth in a yell of pain: while stretching out his filthy fingers for a fruit, he has rather been bitten. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is sensuality amid squalor: observers can discern the painter's gloomy room reflected in the cloudy waters of the glass container.

The adolescent wears a pink blossom in his hair – a emblem of the erotic commerce in Renaissance painting. Northern Italian painters such as Tiziano and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through images, the master represented a renowned woman prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The message of all these floral indicators is clear: intimacy for purchase.

What are we to make of Caravaggio's sensual portrayals of boys – and of one boy in particular? It is a inquiry that has divided his interpreters since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex historical truth is that the painter was not the queer icon that, for example, Derek Jarman presented on film in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so completely pious that, as certain artistic historians unbelievably assert, his Youth Holding Fruit is actually a portrait of Christ.

His initial works indeed offer explicit sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if the painter, then a penniless youthful creator, identified with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to survive. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in mind, observers might look to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece the god of wine, in which the deity of alcohol stares coolly at the spectator as he begins to undo the dark ribbon of his robe.

A several years following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the artistic patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally growing almost respectable with important church commissions? This profane non-Christian god revives the erotic provocations of his initial paintings but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Fifty years afterwards, its secret seemed clear: it was a portrait of the painter's lover. A English visitor viewed Victorious Cupid in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne boy or servant that slept with him". The name of this boy was Cecco.

The artist had been deceased for about forty years when this story was documented.