Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [266]
42. Bellori’s bald statement that the Doubting Thomas was painted for ‘the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani’ is supported by most of the available evidence. Giustiniani certainly owned the picture by 1606, because in the summer of that year he wrote a letter comparing his own, original Doubting Thomas by Caravaggio to a copy in Genoa. Baglione asserted that the Doubting Thomas was painted for Ciriaco Mattei, but this is probably a rare slip of the pen on his part. He may have confused the picture with The Betrayal of Christ, which certainly was painted for Ciriaco Mattei and which, oddly, Baglione does not mention at all. In summary, there is a remote possibility that the Doubting Thomas was painted for Ciriaco Mattei, then later acquired by Vincenzo Giustiniani. But the balance of probability favours a direct commission from Giustiniani himself. For a good analysis of the arguments and a precis of the relevant documents, see John T. Spike, Caravaggio, CD-ROM catalogue entry for Doubting Thomas.
43. See Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, p. 264.
44. Inventory of 9 Feb. 1638; see John T. Spike, Caravaggio, CD-ROM catalogue entry for Omnia vincit amor.
45. The resemblance to Michelangelo’s Victory was first noted by Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, p. 93.
46. See Joachim von Sandrart, L’Accademia Todesca della archittetura, scultura e pittura … (Nuremberg, 1675). Quoted by Robert Enggass, ‘L’Amore Giustiniani del Caravaggio’, Palatino, vol. 11 (1967), pp. 13–19. This translation is from John T. Spike, Caravaggio.
47. The idea is advanced by Robert Enggass in the article cited in the previous note above. If this hypothesis is to be believed, Cupid does not trample the arts and sciences underfoot, but inspires them to flourish in the Giustiniani household. Such an interpretation is, however, flatly contradicted by the Giustiniani inventory of 1638, describing ‘Cupid disparaging the world’. It is also at odds with the purely visual evidence of the painting. In particular, the discarded shell of an empty suit of armour cannot possibly have been intended by the painter as a compliment to the military prowess of his patron. Nor can Caravaggio’s impishly provocative, full-frontally nude Cupid be plausibly transmuted into a Neoplatonic emblem of the Earthly Love that sparks man to Divine Creativity.
48. For an earlier conversation inspired by a painting of Cupid between the Venetian collector Gabriel Vendramin and the connoisseur Anton Francesco Doni, see Catherine Whistler, ‘Titian’s Triumph of Love’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 151, no. 1,277 (Aug. 2009), n. 19, in which the author cites Doni’s I marmi (Venice, 1552), vol. 3, fols. 40–41: ‘e fra l’altro mi mostrò un leone con un Cupido sopra. E qui discorremo molto della bella invenzione, e lodassi ultimamente in questo, che l’amore doma ogni gran ferocità e terribilità à persone.’
49. The Courtauld Galleries in London contain a particularly good example of two such chests in their original condition. As well as being embellished with complex narrative paintings about love, drawn from classical mythology, they are decorated with split pomegranates spilling their seeds, a kind of symbolic prayer for fertile married union.
50. See Charles Dempsey, ‘ “Et nos cedamus amori”: Observations on the Farnese Gallery’, Art Bulletin, vol. 50, no. 4 (Dec. 1968), pp. 363–74.
51. See Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio, pp. 45–6.
52. See Karel van Mander, Het Schilderboek (Haarlem, 1604), cited in Beverly Louise Brown, ‘The Black Wings of Envy: Competition, Rivalry and Paragone’, in The Genius of Rome, Royal Academy exhibition catalogue, p. 251.
53. See Gianni Papi’s essay ‘Cecco del Caravaggio’, in Come dipingeva il Caravaggio: atti della giornata di studio, Mina Gregori (ed.) (Milan, 1996).
54. This transcription was made from the original MSS of Symonds’s travel journal by John Gash, who published it in the Burlington Magazine, vol. 140, no. 1,138 (Jan. 1998), pp. 41–2.
55. See Giorgio Vasari, Lives