Looking at Caravaggio’s Victorious Cupid for the first time, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the instant one’s back is turned, the naked young boy in the picture will jump down out of the frame and run riot. Downright shocking in its life force, Caravaggio’s allegorical painting is unlike anything that came before or after. Indeed, it seems to bespeak some kind of Faustian pact.
Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, an early patron of Caravaggio’s, perhaps best captured his protégé’s artistry when he described it as “natural magic,” particularly in the way light and shadow were used to conjure the profundities of human nature. In Victorious Cupid, Caravaggio demolished Renaissance ideals of the chubby, celestial putto by depicting a young god with the body of an Adonis and the face and feet of a cheeky street urchin. On loan from Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, and never before publicly on view in the U.K., this work is now the centerpiece of the exhibition “Caravaggio’s Cupid,” at London’s Wallace Collection.
