Amor Vincit Omnia
The subject was a common one for the age. Caravaggio's treatment is remarkable for the realism of his Cupid â€" where other depictions, such as a contemporary
Sleeping Cupid by Battistello (Naples 1578-1630), show an idealised, almost generic, beautiful boy, Caravaggio's Cupid is highly individual, charming but not at all beautiful, all crooked teeth and crooked grin: one feels that one would recognise him in the street. The shock of the Caravaggio, quite apart from the dramatic
chiaroscuro lighting and the photographic clarity, is the mingling of the
allegorical and the real, this sense it gives of a child who is having a thoroughly good time dressing up in stage-prop wings with a bunch of arrows and having his picture painted. Nevertheless, despite the clear indications of Caravaggio's practice of painting direct from a live model, there is an undeniable resemblance to the pose of
Michelangelo's Victory now in the
Palazzo Vecchio,
Florence, and it is likely the artist had this in mind.
The painter
Orazio Gentileschi called the painting
Earthly Love, and it was an immediate success in the circles of Rome's intellectual and cultural elite. A poet immediately wrote three
madrigals about it, and another wrote a Latin
epigram in which it was first coupled with the Virgilian phrase
Omnia Vincit Amor, although this did not become its title until the critic
Giovanni Pietro Bellori wrote his life of Caravaggio in 1672.
Inevitably, much scholarly and non-scholarly ink has been spilled over the alleged
eroticism of the painting. Yet the
homoerotic, not to say
pederastic, content was perhaps not so apparent to Giustiniani's generation as it has become today. Naked boys could be seen on any riverbank or seashore, and the eroticisation of children is very much a cultural artefact of the present-day rather than Caravaggio's. Certainly neither Giustiniani, who was not a
homosexual, nor his visitors, appear to have been concerned by the question of
modesty â€" or to have even raised it â€" and the story that the Marchese kept
Amor hidden behind a curtain relates to his reported wish that it should be kept as a final
pièce de résistance for visitors, to be seen only when the rest of the collection had been viewed â€" in other words, the curtain was to reveal the painting, not to hide it. (According to the historian Joachim von Sandrart, who catalogued the Giustiniani collection in the 1630s, the curtain was only installed at his urging at that time). The challenge is to see the
Amor Vincit through 17th century eyes.
In 1602, shortly after
Amor Vincit was completed, Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani, Vincenzo's brother and collaborator in the creation of the Giustiniani collection of contemporary art, commissioned a painting from the noted artist
Giovanni Baglione. Baglione's
Divine and Profane Love showed Divine Love separating a juvenile Cupid on the ground in the lower right corner (profane love) from a
Lucifer in the left corner. Its style was thoroughly derivative of Caravaggio (who had recently emerged as a rival for Church commissions) and a clear challenge to the recent
Amor, and the younger painter bitterly protested at what he saw as the plagiarism. Taunted by one of Caravaggio's friends, Baglione responded with a second version, in which the devil was given Caravaggio's face. Thus began a long and vicious quarrel which was to have unforseeable ramifications for Caravaggio decades after his death when the unforgiving Baglione became his first biographer.
Sandrart described
Amor as "A life size Cupid after a boy of about twelve...[who] has large brown eagle's wings, drawn so correctly and with such strong colouring, clarity and relief that it all comes to life." Richard Symonds, an English visitor to Rome about 1649/51, recorded the Cupid as being "ye body and face of his (Caravaggio's) owne boy or servant thait (sic) laid with him" - bearing in mind that "laid with" in 17th century English meant simply "lived with". The Italian art historian Giani Pappi has put forward the theory that this Cecco may be identical with
Cecco del Caravaggio ('Caravaggio's Cecco'), a notable Italian follower of Caravaggio who emerged in the decade after the master's death. While this remains controversial, there is more widespread support for Pappi's further proposal that Cecco del Caravaggio should be identified as an artist known as Francesco Boneri. Cecco Boneri, if this is his name, appears in many of Caravaggio's paintings, as the juvenile angel supporting Christ in
The Conversion of Saint Paul, (1600-1601) possibly as the angel offering a martyr's palm to the saint in
The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (1599-1600) (although seen only as the top of a curly head of hair), as the young Isaac about to have his throat cut in
The Sacrifice of Isaac (1603), as an adolescent David in
David with the Head of Goliath (1605-1606 - the head is Caravaggio's), and as the
John the Baptist now in the Capitoline gallery in Rome.
#See Catherine Puglisi, "Caravaggio", pp. 201-202##Quoted in Peter Robb, "M", p.194#Quoted ibid, p.195
* Catherine Puglisi,
Caravaggio, Phaidon, London/New York, 1998. ISBN 0714839663
*
Peter Robb,
M:The Caravaggio Enigma, Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney, 1998. ISBN 1876631791
