I FIRST tailed Caravaggio’s Cupid to New York forty years ago. Since then, I have caught up with him in Rome and at home in Berlin, in 2001; in Amsterdam (2006), played off against Rembrandt’s 1635 Rape of Ganymede; and four times since 2010 in the Gemäldegalerie, often in the hope that my personal life might change. Now, Dr Dagmar Hirschfelder, the Berlin director, has unleashed the unruly youth on a London audience: a follow-up and fitting exchange for Frans Hals’s The Laughing Cavalier.
Caravaggio (1571-1610) painted this extraordinary caprice in 1602 for the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani (d. 1638), whose outstanding collection of ancient sculptures and modern art were housed in the family palace, where the Carabinieri who guard the Roman Senate opposite now live and sleep, until 1791.
He and his brother Benedetto (d. 1621) owned more than a dozen paintings by Caravaggio, including a version of The Lute Player, The Incredulity of St Thomas (Potsdam), and four now lost works; portraits of Fillide Melandroni, of the German artist Sigismondo Laire, a Saint Augustine, and The Garden of Gethsemane.
The image is raw, brazen, and yet somehow innocent, despite all that we are invited to see. We have surprised a kid mucking around in a dressing-up box, trying on oversized eagle’s wings. (The Giustiniani family emblem was an eagle.) He is standing amid a scatter of musical instruments, books, armour, and a celestial globe, better seen in the Sienese artist Astolfo Petrazzi’s slightly later response (c.1620), now in the National Gallery of Art in Athens.
It was painted as part of a continuing debate about the primacy of painting among the arts (especially sculpture). The polygynous shoppers in Selfridges and in Mayfair will shy away from this playful debate about how the West can (sometimes) rejoice in the nude and how ripely Caravaggio paints for the world of the modern London metrosexual.
But I noticed for the first time that Cupid’s bowstring is broken and hangs limply. As W. H. Auden has it, in “The Moment”, “If you see a fair form, chase it, and if possible embrace it, be it a girl or boy.” Happy Valentine!
“Caravaggio’s Cupid” is at the Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, London W1, until 12 April. Phone 0207 5639500. wallacecollection.org