Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [141]
The objects in the painting may have been selected to reflect Vincenzo Giustiniani’s own interests and family history. He was an author and a well-known musical amateur with a keen interest in astrology. The Giustiniani also had an illustrious military and political history. According to one ingenious (but incorrect) interpretation, the picture is not even intended to show love’s triumph over all worldly endeavours. Instead it is a celebration of Vincenzo Giustiniani’s many accomplishments, a Neoplatonic allegory of the passion propelling him and his family to so many different forms of excellence.47 But if art and culture really were being celebrated, why would their remnants litter the floor like bric-a-brac?
Sandrart’s remark about the patron keeping the picture until the end of a tour through his house – saving the best until last – is suggestive. Having shown his guests his splendid palace, his collections of classical statuary, his musical camerino, his pictures by the great masters of Italian art, Giustiniani would show them this – an allegory of all hubris, creative and intellectual, brought low at the feet of love. An elegant gesture of knowing self-deprecation was surely intended. As rich and influential as he was, as accomplished in the arts, letters and sciences, even he still had to concede – with a graceful smile, of course – that there was a limit to his powers. Before love, all must give way.48
But Omnia vincit amor was more than just an excuse for that graceful flourish of rhetoric. The picture is arrestingly littered with letter v’s. The majuscule in the musical part-book is a v. The set square is arranged in the form of a v. The compasses form an upside down v. The violin and lute fall across each other to form a v. The crown and sceptre shape a v. So does the curiously awkward arrangement of the Cupid’s splayed legs. His wings echo the shape too. They are eagle’s wings, which also formed part of the Giustiniani family crest. All these v’s are also implicated in an orgiastic series of sexual consummations. The set square pushes at the furled circle formed by the part-book’s leaves. The compass straddles the set square. The bow of the violin has slid over the neck of the instrument. The sceptre phallically pierces the circle of the crown. Even the white sheet on which the boy rests has contrived to fold itself, at the point just below Cupid’s phallus, into the shape of the female sex.
The phrase omnia vincit amor is taken from Virgil’s Eclogues, where it is followed by the line et nos cedamus amori: ‘Love conquers all; let us lovers all yield to it.’ In Caravaggio’s painting, the objects of art and culture have not merely been conquered by love, they have given themselves up to passion. The picture buzzes and pulsates with libidinous energy. It is a mythology shot through with a raucously erotic and life-affirming sense of comedy, a fantasy of learning and knowledge suddenly caught up in the throes of sexual self-abandonment.
But why would Caravaggio have painted such a picture for a Roman nobleman? And why would a man such as Vincenzo Giustiniani have wanted one? There was in fact a long tradition of such erotically charged mythologies in Italian painting. They were usually created on the occasion of family weddings. The earliest examples were painted on the panels of the wedding chests traditionally given by groom to bride in fifteenth-century Tuscany.49 By the end of the fifteenth century the mythological love painting had emancipated itself from the decoration of wedding chests to become an independent art form. Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is the most famous example. The goddess of love rises from the sea and steps on to dry land. As she does, a cloak is readied by Venus’s handmaiden to wrap her perfect body. A particular bunched fold of