Ut pictura poësis. L’iconografia del Cupido Giustiniani di Caravaggio e la poesia classica

Abstract

The Cupid, also known as Amor Vincit Omnia, painted by Caravaggio in the first half of 1602 for Vincenzo Giustiniani in Rome, is one of the best-known paintings by the Lombard painter, but also one of the most investigated and iconographically debated. Art historians have proposed different readings of this work, from those they consider the objects surrounding Amor symbols that refer to the arts of the quadrivium, but incompletely; others that make it generically included among the emblematic paintings or connect it to the patron whose intellectual and military qualities it would exalt; still others connect it to the Trionfi of Petrarch or to the poetry of the same period, or give it a soteric value linked to the reformed Catholic doctrines; finally, some identify a homoerotic matrix linked to the author or even to the client's environment. In this article, starting from some readings already advanced by critics over time, a reading closely linked to classical poetry is proposed, considering Merisi's painting the pictura of an emblem, to which a precise lemma would be connected, identified in the well-known couplet by Marzio Milesi and a broader epigramma, instead identified in a well-known Latin elegiac passage, which the observers of the time could have easily identified. A reading that would also present a profound moral value directly linked to the Catholic doctrine that distinguishes antecedent concupiscence from consequent concupiscence.