Amor Vincit Omnia

When the Medici clerks listed this canvas in the late 17th century they did not call it a victorious Cupid. They wrote it down as Love that masters everything, and elsewhere as the genius of virtue, and that second name is closer to what the gallery says is going on. The winged boy sits among carefully painted objects of human work: instruments and books for the arts and the sciences, arms, a crown for earthly power. The Palatine Gallery reads them as an argument, that you should not give in to the passions but take up the arts instead. The picture hangs in the Sala di Ulisse under the title the museum uses today, Amore vincitore, and Riminaldi painted it in Rome in the middle of the 1620s, a few years before he went home to Pisa for good.