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with its flowery phrases and polished rhetoric, was almost certainly Wignacourt’s erudite secretary, Francesco dell’Antella, who had also played a part in lobbying for Caravaggio’s knighthood some months earlier.65 Dell’Antella was a learned Florentine, who for a Knight of Malta prided himself on his sophistication and classical learning. He also took an unusually strong interest in art. He was himself a gifted amateur draughtsman, who produced an impressively detailed drawing of Valletta as one of the illustrations for his friend Giacomo Bosio’s history of the Order of St John. Dell’Antella would eventually become an official member of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence, the first Italian art academy, founded by Giorgio Vasari in the mid sixteenth century.66 Like Caravaggio, dell’Antella was a proud and stormy man with a tendency to violence. He had even killed Wignacourt’s own nephew in a swordfight, but had been magnanimously forgiven by the Grand Master on the grounds that he had been unjustly provoked. This similarity of temperament and history may have given the two men some affinity.

Perhaps as a gesture of gratitude to dell’Antella, perhaps to commission, Caravaggio painted a wry and learned cabinet picture for him, Sleeping Cupid. The mischievous and malign child-god lies sleeping, one wing folded beneath him, the other reduced to the barely perceptible rim of a feathery arc. In his left hand he limply holds a bow, of Indo-Persian design, and a feathered dart of love. A dim light illuminates the scene, suggestive of the first glimmers of dawn. The picture is a darker, drowsier, dreamlike version of the Omnia vincit amor painted in 1602 for Vincenzo Giustiniani. This time the Cupid is not an adolescent boy but a child, with the plump, fleshy body and heavy, lolling head of a toddler.

The painting is close in spirit to a poem about a statue of sleeping Cupid in Giambattista Marino’s La Galeria, an anthology of verse inspired by works of art both real and imaginary. Marino was a close contemporary of Caravaggio, and had been a friend of his in Rome, so it is possible that the painter had the poet’s verses in mind when he painted his picture.

Marino begins by warning the prospective visitor to his poetical museum against waking the image of the sleeping child:

Guàrdati Peregrino

non gli andar si vicino,

nol desar, prega, ch’egli

dorma in eterno pur, né mai si svegli.

Se tu’l sonno tenace

rompi al fanciul sagace,

desto il vedrai più forte

trattar quell’armi, ond’è

e peggior che Morte.

Look out, Pilgrim

do not get so close,

do not rouse him, pray that he

sleeps forever and never wakes up.

If you break the clever boy’s sleep,

right away you will see him yet more strongly

take up those weapons that make him

worse than death.67

Marino’s sleeping child is lost in cruel dreams of deceptions, massacres and sufferings. Dawn is breaking and he will soon awake to visit more miseries of love on his countless victims. The poem ends with a question, and a joking reminder that the subject of all these fears and fantasies is after all merely a work of art:

Qual tu ti sia, che ‘l miri,

temi non vivi e spiri?

Stendi securo il passo:

toccal pur, scherza teco, egli è di sasso.

Whoever you are, who gaze upon him,

do you fear lest he live and breathe?

Lengthen your stride with confidence, do not tiptoe,

Touch him even – I was teasing you – he is made of stone.

Caravaggio’s painting also plays teasingly on the boundary between art and reality. The sleeping boy is an image, but of a disconcertingly lifelike kind. His teeth can be seen glinting behind his half-closed lips. The abandon with which his head is thrown back and the look of absorption on his face powerfully conjure the illusion of a real child caught up in a vivid dream. But there are other ways of looking at this picture too. Like Marino’s poem, Caravaggio’s painting looks back knowingly to the world of antiquity. Not only does it evoke the myth of