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The full title of Baglione’s painting, now in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, is Divine Love Overcoming Earthly Love, the World, the Flesh and the Devil. It is no masterpiece but it is a clever and vicious painting, carefully calculated to try to wound Caravaggio and cloud his reputation. Inverting both the moral and the message of Omnia vincit amor, Baglione shows love conquered by virtue. A saint in armour subdues a cowed and cowering Cupid, while the devil skulks in darkness to one side. Although armed with a thunderbolt rather than shield and sword, the figure of Divine Love evokes traditional images of Archangel Michael trampling Satan underfoot – a detail that can only have been intended to sharpen Baglione’s satire. Caravaggio’s own holy namesake is shown exorcizing the erotic and demonic spirits of Caravaggio’s art. The resemblance to St Michael may also have been meant as a sideswipe at Gentileschi and his own ‘picture of St Michael the Archangel’. But Caravaggio was the primary target. Baglione’s parody is completed by the emphatically Caravaggesque lighting that flashes across the vengeful angel and the prone, flaccid form of Cupid below.

Not content with satirizing Caravaggio and his art, Baglione even dared to offer his own picture to Vincenzo Giustiniani’s brother, Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani. Yet more galling, it was accepted, and Baglione given the traditional painter’s reward of a gold chain. Gentileschi, who would tell this part of the story too in court, was distinctly unamused by the whole affair. He tried to get his own back by telling Baglione that his avenging angel should have been naked and childlike, perhaps deliberately misunderstanding the figure’s pointed and satirical resemblance to the Archangel Michael: ‘[Baglione] had dedicated Divine Love to Cardinal Giustiniani and although said picture was not liked as much as the one by Michelangelo – all the same, that Cardinal gave him a neck chain. That painting had many flaws. I told him he had done a grown-up man in armour who should have been nude and putto, so he did another that was completely nude.’

That last remark is only half true. Baglione did paint another Divine Love, the version now in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, but he completely ignored Gentileschi’s advice. The second and equally grown-up angel is certainly no naked putto. He still wears armour, albeit modified this time to a breastplate and some wisps of drapery. The most important change has been made elsewhere, at the bottom of the picture. The devil, previously shown lurking in obscurity, now wheels round with an expression of startled guilt on his face. Despite his staring eyes, his fangs and his pointed ears, he is unmistakably a portrait in caricature of Caravaggio, caught in flagrante with a flushed and furtive Cupid. Baglione’s second Divine Love went beyond satire. It was a visual accusation of sodomy.

Baglione repeated that charge verbally, and in public. He and his friends talked openly about Caravaggio keeping company with a bardassa – vulgar Italian slang derived from a Turkish word for a young man who took the female part in sexual encounters with other men. Rome’s artists gossiped, so people may have begun to look at Caravaggio’s Omnia vincit amor in a different light. The identity of the boy who had modelled for Cupid was known. He was Cecco di Caravaggio, who prepared the artist’s paint and his canvases.53 If Baglione was to be believed, not only was he Caravaggio’s assistant and model, he was also his catamite.

Half a century later, the story was still current. In about 1650 an English artist called Richard Symonds was shown round the Giustiniani collection in Rome. He made notes on the pictures, writing down any anecdotes that struck him. He obviously spent a while in front of Omnia vincit amor. The custode told him that it was one of the most precious pictures in the collection, that it had cost 300 scudi, and that both the Cardinal of Savoy and a member of the Crescenzi