Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [140]
A smooth-skinned, naked young Cupid, far removed from the wizened saints of Caravaggio’s devotional pictures, confronts the viewer with a puckish smile. The figure half sits and half stands, one leg raised and bent at an angle of almost ninety degrees to his body. Awkwardly perched on a table draped with a white sheet, he occupies an interior cluttered with the stuff of intellectual, artistic, military and political endeavour: men may fight and dream, create and aspire, but in the end love will always triumph over all. The picture’s symbolism is concisely explained in a 1638 inventory of the Giustiniani collection, where it is listed as ‘A painting of a smiling Cupid, in the act of disparaging the world’.44 The question of whether it may have had other and deeper meanings, both for Caravaggio and for his patron, Vincenzo Giustiniani, has been hotly contested.
The pubescent boy who modelled for the picture also modelled for the St John the Baptist, painted by Caravaggio for Ciriaco Mattei at around the same time. Like that other picture, Omnia vincit amor is a variation on Michelangelo’s ignudi in the Sistine Chapel, although the effect on this occasion could hardly be more different. The St John is a sanctified version of a Michelangelo nude, spiritually transformed by Christian revelation. This dazzling Cupid in an airless room is devoid of conscience or piety. He embodies a triumphant, amoral, vibrant sexuality.
The figure’s pose carries echoes not only of the ignudi, but also of famous sculptures, one by Michelangelo, the marble figure of Victory,45 and one by Donatello, the celebrated bronze David, the first freestanding image of the male nude since antiquity, a work charged with homoerotic overtones. Caravaggio’s sexy adolescent is the extrovert alter ego of Donatello’s veiled, ambiguous, naked young man. The most sensually explicit detail of Donatello’s bronze is a feather, a plume from the felled Goliath’s helmet, that tickles David’s inner thigh. The same motif is repeated in Caravaggio’s painting, but here the boy’s leg is brushed by the tip of one of his own Cupid’s wings.
Joachim von Sandrart, a guest of Vincenzo Giustiniani between 1629 and 1635, reported that the marchese prized the Omnia vincit amor above all the other works in his collection. He gave an admiring, if not altogether accurate, description of the picture itself, and an arresting account of the manner in which it was originally displayed:
Caravaggio painted for the Marchese Giustiniani a life-size Cupid as a boy of about 12 years old, seated on a globe, and raising his bow in his right hand. On his left are various instruments, a book for studies, a laurel wreath. The Cupid has the brown wings of an eagle. Everything is accurately and clearly designed with bright colours and a three-dimensionality that approximates reality. This painting was among 120 others in a gallery of the most celebrated artists. But, I recall, it was covered with a curtain of dark green silk, and was shown last, after all the others, to avoid eclipsing the other works.46
The objects strewn at Cupid’s feet and by his side form a dispersed but uniquely haunting still life: a hallucination of things. They allude to the arts, sciences and letters. A compass and triangle, representing architecture as well as geometry, are prominent in the left foreground. A violin and a lute, rendered in extreme foreshortening, are propped on a musical part-book. A manuscript, emblem of literary ambition, lies open and abandoned on the floor. A laurel wreath has been dropped on to an empty cuirass and other scattered pieces of armour, of the same dark steel as that worn by the sinister soldier in The Betrayal of Christ. These signs of military glory undone are complemented by the crown and sceptre obscurely nestling in the dishevelled sheets near Cupid’s raised calf. Poking out from behind his right thigh