Mythology - Amor Vincit Omnia

• Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Victorious Cupid (Amor Vincit Omnia) 1 , c. 1602
• Key facts:

  Size: 156 cm × 113 cm

  Medium: oil on canvas

  Location: now, Gemäldegalerie (art museum), Berlin Patron: Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani
• Amor vincit omnia – love conquers all, is a line from ancient poet, Virgil’s Eclogues, 37 BCE.
• Description

  In this mythological painting, a very naked Cupid – god of erotic love and son of love goddess, Venus, is represented surrounded by musical instruments. He looks directly and invitingly at the viewer. Despite the religiosity of the times, this secular work is about love above music and the sciences.
• Iconography

  Cupid was historically depicted as a cheeky child with a bow and arrows. Those wounded by one kind of arrow fell in love with the first person they met, those wounded by another aroused repulsion to the first person they met.
• Composition and Light:

  • Cupid is depicted in close proximity to the viewer, a nearness enhanced with the use of foreshortening.
  • Cupid dominates the composition and is positioned on the central vertical axis. Caravaggio’s palette changed over time, turning darker, towards tenebrism (predominantly dark), as is evident here.
  • The black void, characteristic of Caravaggio’s oeuvre, creates psychological tension and intensifies our focus on the figure.
  • . The artist’s use of pronounced chiaroscuro and exceptionally stark tonal contrasts helped to create a dramatic mood typical of the Baroque style.
• There is movement insofar as the young boy’s precarious pose is unsustainable – his cocked leg on straining toes can only be described as transient. The whole space has been contracted and all the variables collide to create a constructed and almost chaotic scene.
• Style

  Italian Baroque (Naturalism). Caravaggio’s oeuvre is characteristic of Baroque painting generally: use of diagonals, figures and objects not being wholly confined to the picture plane, transient, dramatic lighting, hyperbolic expression and emphatic gesture.
• Caravaggio’s image is naturalistic and unidealised. He was accused of a lack of decorum on occasion: his characters are known to have been grubby nobodies from the backstreets of the city.
• Context

  Mythological subjects had historically been shown idealised and even fantastical: Caravaggio’s mythological cupid is so real, so naturalistic, it’s as far from immortal as was imaginable. Although The Council of Trent enrolled the arts to strengthen the Catholic faith everywhere, Rome provided an ancient Roman backdrop and mythological subjects were an intrinsic part of the city’s history. Not least, mythological/allegorical subjects allowed for greater imagination than their religious counterparts.
• Materials and processes

  • Caravaggio worked alla prima (straight onto the canvas), and that he painted alla prima may explain the proliferation of pentimento (a barely visible trace of earlier painting which has been over painted).
• • Caravaggio was not the first artist to use chiaroscuro but he made its dramatising effect a signature part of his style along with tenebrism (from the Italian tenebroso, meaning dark); an effect wellsuited to his identification with darker episodes in the bible and here the secrecy of veiled homoeroticism.
• Caravaggio’s forms are always solid, his paint applied relatively thinly and his brushwork largely disguised. (Wittkower, p.24). His naturalism is epitomised in the attention to detail here: the believably crisp folds in the linen, the milkiness of the flesh and the greasiness of those eagle feathers – every texture made plausible with the highest degree of verisimilitude.
• Patronage

  Marchese Giustiniani owned 13 works by Caravaggio, the largest held by a private collector. Upon his death, Giustiniani’s inventory describes the Cupid as ‘A picture of a laughing Cupid, who shows his contempt for the world, which lies at his feet in the guise of various instruments, crowns, sceptres, and armour, known, because of its fame, as the Cupid of Caravaggio’
• Influences

  Caravaggio had predecessors and the influence of Lombard realism is well documented, particularly by twentieth-century art historian Roberto Longhi, who stressed the artist’s “blood-and soil” heritage of Lombard realism. Caravaggio followed in the Lombard realism in so far as he did not separate the divine from the earthly and we have seen evidence of this in works such as The Crucifixion of St. Peter, where the saint looks like anyone, everyone’s, neighbour. Peterzano’s influence may also be found in the defined musculature that Caravaggio would execute so faithfully.
• Critical quote (Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Life of Caravaggio, 1672)

  "he possessed neither invention, nor decorum, nor design, nor any knowledge of the science of painting. The moment the model was taken away from his eyes his hand and his imagination remained empty…"
• Hibbard notes...

  "a compound of admiration and almost childish rebellion”
• A musical manuscript on the floor shows a large "V". It has therefore been suggested also that the picture is a reference to the achievements of Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani. 
• Scattered around are the emblems of all human endeavors – violin and lute, armor, coronet, square and compasses, pen and manuscript, bay leaves, and flower, tangled and trampled under Cupid's foot. The painting illustrates the line from Virgil's Eclogues, Omnia Vincit Amor et nos cedamus amori ("Love conquers all; let us all yield to love").