Caravaggio by Andrew Graham-Dixon

Author:Andrew Graham-Dixon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780141962948
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-07-01T10:00:00+00:00

The objects strewn at Cupid’s feet and by his side form a dispersed but uniquely haunting still life: a hallucination of things. They allude to the arts, sciences and letters. A compass and triangle, representing architecture as well as geometry, are prominent in the left foreground. A violin and a lute, rendered in extreme foreshortening, are propped on a musical part-book. A manuscript, emblem of literary ambition, lies open and abandoned on the floor. A laurel wreath has been dropped on to an empty cuirass and other scattered pieces of armour, of the same dark steel as that worn by the sinister soldier in The Betrayal of Christ. These signs of military glory undone are complemented by the crown and sceptre obscurely nestling in the dishevelled sheets near Cupid’s raised calf. Poking out from behind his right thigh is the rim of a celestial globe, blue with gold stars. Astronomy too has been laid low by Cupid, who holds up two arrows – not his bow, as Sandrart had asserted – to symbolize his triumph over all the works and schemes of industrious but easily tempted humanity.

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.

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