Eros Triumphant

In January 1622 Petrazzi signed a contract in Rome for an altarpiece in the church of the Florentine community there, and documents keep him in the city until 1628. Those are the years the National Gallery assigns this canvas, roughly 1620 to 1630. Its subject was all around him. Caravaggio had painted a winged Cupid trampling the instruments of human accomplishment some 20 years earlier for Vincenzo Giustiniani, a Roman banker whose palace collection painters went to see. Petrazzi came back to the idea more than once. Another of his versions is in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome and others are in private hands, so the Athens canvas is one of several he made of the theme. It reached Greece with the collection of Stefanos Skouloudis, a banker who served as prime minister in 1915 and 1916.