Amor Victorious by Caravaggio, 1601-1602

 

 

Caravaggio's second playful adaptation of a work by Michelangelo is his Victorious Amor in Berlin. By reducing the Victory, Michelangelo's most manneristic and elongated figure, to stocky boyish proportions, the Amor must have appeared as an outrage bordering on sacrilege to those still adhering to Michelangelesque canons.

The posture of his lower limbs, one leg extended and the other bent back at almost a right angle to the body, clearly imitates Michelangelo's figure; the only difference is that the Victory crushes between his legs the pathetic head of a bearded old man, like Mithras killing the bull, while Cupid's left leg rests casually on the table which is covered with white drapery. Above the waist, however, nothing remains to recall Michelangelo. The sturdy torso and insolent, lively expression, totally alien to the athletic beauty of Michelangelo's figure with its spiraling torsion and empty face, might have been drawn from a street urchin.

Like the St. John in the Desert, this brazen boy is still related in spirit to the early transmutations of Caravaggio's self, now wittily exalted beyond those youthful disguises to the position of a demon who laughingly dominates the whole world: Omnia vincit amor.

Never before was the reputed mischievousness of Cupid so pointedly stressed. The whole attitude of Caravaggio's figure lends an air of uncompromising travesty to the Platonic implications of Michelangelo's tragic masterpiece, and in fact to the whole Renaissance ideal of love. In keeping with the jest, the heavy dark eagle- or vulture-wings, which contrast markedly with white swan-wings (like those of the angel in the first St. Matthew) seem rather loosely attached to the boy's back as if they did not belong to him, although the boy obviously takes wholeheartedly to his role of Cupid. As a sign of his office he triumphantly raises two arrows in his right hand, one tipped with a red point and the other with black, indicating, perhaps, the two wounds of love accepted and love rejected.

Caravaggio's half-stylized and half-naturalistic, partly satirical and partly serious "Earthly Love" was counterbalanced in the collection of Vincenzo Giustiniani, by an earnest and rather prudish painting of Divine Love by Giovanni Baglione, dedicated to Cardinal Giustiniani, Vincenzo's brother. In this diligent work the Divine Love is shown with a sword raised in one hand, taking menacing steps over the fallen and naked body of the young Earthly Love and a satyr representing worldly lust.

Furthermore, this challenging Amor is vested like a Saint Michael in shining armor from neck to toe, which seems to have provoked criticism from some of Baglione's contemporaries. Orazio Gentileschi, in speaking of this painting, remarks reprovingly that an Amor should, properly speaking, be a "putto e nudo"; Baglione evidently found it necessary to take heed of this comment, for he made a second version in which the Amor retains the same very Zuccaresque pose, but wears less clothing.

The bold nudity of Caravaggio's boy seems like an open retort to the overstressed propriety of Baglione's first version, and it may even be intentional that the lower right corner of Caravaggio's Amor is so conspicuously filled with plates of cast-off armor. On the whole the confidence of Caravaggio's boy is so overwhelming as to put on the defensive any bearer of divine heraldry, especially the weak and uninspired Divine Love of Baglione.

Earthly Love now triumphs over symbols of the moral and intellectual world. At his feet, unobserved and despised, are objects alluding to everything associated with the highest human values from the time of Plato's Republic: science and art, literary fame and martial glory. Geometry and music, two of the seven liberal arts often closely associated, portentously fill the greater part of the left side; the usual tokens of geometry, the compass and triangle, are in the foreground with their sharp points directed at the spectator, while music is prominently represented by two magnificent stringed instruments, the recently invented Cremonese violin with the bow slung over the finger board, and the more conventional lute with its pegbox sharply bent back.

A part- book, showing four systems each of five staves is spread out beneath the instruments. Portions of a blue globe with gold stars are visible behind the right leg of Cupid. Altogether these features constitute three parts of the scholastic formula of the quadrivium: music, geometry and astronomy. Only arithmetic appears to be missing, unless possibly it is present in the prominently displayed lute with its pegs suggesting the graduations of tones. The objects on the right, however, do not complete the scholastic classification with representations of the trivium. Rather, the symbolism is loftier and more meaningful.

Oddly correlative with the numerous paintings of Vanitas of this period, where death in the form of a skull mocks at the empty pleasures of vanity, the "puer lascivus" here smilingly annihilates the creations of the ambitious, triumphing over the branch of laurel with its red berries and evergreen leaves, the usual symbol of immortal fame. A big volume, negligently tossed aside, lies behind Cupid's left leg, perhaps the magnum opus of some great master, its open pages revealing lines scribbled with the long white quill.

Equally belittled is military glory, defamed and discredited by the useless cuirass and empty pieces of armor. As the final humiliation, the crown and sceptre are almost hidden among the folds of white drapery on the table.

Print DIGG MIXX!

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