Sacred Love Overcoming Profane Love

In 1602 Caravaggio's naked, laughing Cupid, the picture known as Love Victorious, belonged to the banker and collector Vincenzo Giustiniani. His brother, Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani, ordered a reply from Giovanni Baglione. In it a winged Divine Love comes down on the naked earthly Cupid and on a devil, the two of them crushed beneath him. Baglione's picture came up again a year later in court. He had sued Caravaggio and several of his friends over insulting verses, and one of the accused, the painter Orazio Gentileschi, used his testimony to pick the first version apart. Divine Love, he said, ought to have been a naked child, and Baglione had made him a big armed man. By Orazio's account, the criticism pushed Baglione to paint the subject a second time. The museum takes the canvas now in Berlin for that first version and this one for the second. It is signed and dated 1602, just above the head of the beaten Cupid. Here the devil turns his face out of the shadow and looks straight at us. Baglione remembered both pictures in his lives of the artists, published in 1642, where he says they hung in the hall of the cardinal's palace, one facing the other.