Caravaggio's Cupid

When I see him, it’s a cold day in January and the cloud is hanging low over London, rendering everything flat and shadowless. I’ve come to The Wallace Collection—an opulent townhouse turned opulent gallery—because I want to see something extraordinary, something that will move me. It’s been a long, wet winter and London has become grayscale—each green park reduced to mud, each grand building made boring by endless rain. My eyes are hungry for beauty and, inside the gallery, each wall is crammed with it: oil paintings smiling and frowning and smirking down at me, painted flowers blooming and wilting, fruit ripening and rotting again. Soon, I begin to feel sick and stuffed with it all. 

I’m readying myself to step back out into the cold, but he catches my eye, and I pause. He’s smiling at me and stepping forward as though he’s been waiting for my arrival. It’s hard to place his age—his face is boyish and teenage, clean shaven, but his body ripples with muscle. He is undeniably beautiful, crowned with a head of curly dark hair that cascades down his neck and he is flanked on both sides by a pair of dark eagle wings, one of which points subtly to his privates, which are displayed shamelessly. He invites me towards him, and I obey, stepping closer.

The label to his side tells me that he is Cupid, painted by Caravaggio in Rome around 1602, when Caravaggio’s fortunes were at their height. The piece is titled “Amor Vincit Omnia,” Latin for “love conquers all”—taken, apparently, from a line of Virgil’s poetry that reads “Omnia vincit amor: et nos cedamus amori”, or “love conquers all; so let us yield to love.” Cupid steps forward from an overturned table, and below him are toppled instruments, sheet music, armor, and a crown—a trail of destruction. In his hand, he holds two arrows: one is red, for requited love, and one is black, for rejected love. His smile suggests that one of them is for me, and only he knows which.

I suspect that he also smiles because he knows he’ll triumph over me, too, and that I am often weak-willed and stupid when it comes to love. Behind me, there is a similar trail of destruction, but in the place of lutes and crowns there is a string of scorned exes, failed situationships, and hookups turned sour. A couple of years ago, I had my first big breakup—of which I was the instigator—and before that, I had spent a decade falling in and out of undefined, fleeting relationships, waking up in beds that weren’t mine. I was often afraid and unsure if I could ask to be held, afraid such intimacy and need might cause more destruction. I am not someone who does things casually. It has taken me a long time to learn that the heat of desire must consume me or be extinguished: no flame can be kept half alight. Since I stumbled out of my last relationship, exhausted and alone, burned up by love, I have struggled to keep a consistent flame burning. It flickers, and stalls, and goes out entirely, and I sometimes wonder if it will ever come back at all.

*

I turn away from Cupid, gather my coat and leave the gallery, descending down the steps into the damp winter air. The cold is familiar and I feel it caressing my face, running its fingers over my cheeks and turning them pink. It's an austere sensation that reminds me of chastity, allowing me to sink into the cold deadening of desire like an ice bath. 

Perhaps Caravaggio longed for the death of desire, too. The British traveler Richard Symonds saw Caravaggio’s Cupid in 1649 and described it as having “the body & face of [Caravaggio’s] owne boy or servant that laid with him”—(“laid”, in this context, meaning “had sex with.”) The boy who modelled for Cupid was Caravaggio’s studio assistant, Cecco Boneri, and it’s Cecco’s face that appears in his Cupid and in other paintings. He was a sensual John the Baptist, a restrained sacrificial Isaac, and, most notably, as David holding a decapitated Goliath’s head—with Goliath bearing the face of Caravaggio himself, staring dead-eyed and open-mouthed into the middle distance. 

Caravaggio’s “David with the Head of Goliath” is, in many ways, a companion piece to his Cupid. Both paintings show Cecco as destructive, his beauty upending both Caravaggio’s life and sense of order. In “David with the Head of Goliath,” Caravaggio is depicted as the victim of his own desire—he has, quite literally, lost his head—while Cecco looks both bemused and concerned, with his sword resting across his crotch as though afraid of his own sexual power. It is clear that Caravaggio is both enamored and terrified of Cecco’s influence over him.

I have been both Cecco and Caravaggio, and sometimes both at once: the destroyer and the destroyed. And yet were I to explain this to a new partner and recount this history of romantic calamity, it’s not only plausible but probable that they would show me their own history full of calamities, upturned lives, and resounding defeat. Love is to conquer and be conquered—at one moment, your lover chases after you, and the next, you chase doggedly after them, leaving both of your lives as wreckage, turned to chaos by wanting.

Enduring love is created in the ashes of this explosion, when something new can take root, when you both emerge from the ruins of lust into the light, blinking and wide-eyed. It’s uncertain whether Caravaggio ever had this kind of love: in between painting, he staggered from one scandal to the next, eventually fleeing Rome in 1606 after fatally stabbing a rival in a duel. It was then that he painted himself as the beheaded Goliath brought to bear for his sins. He died four years later, having never married.

*

I descend into the station and the cold winter air gives way to the heat of the tube network. Looking at everyone crowded into the carriages, I wonder who they’ve fucked over for love and who they’ve been fucked over by. I’m not dating much at the moment and, for now, my trail of destruction has halted. I’m enjoying the calm and quiet of a solitary life.

What I know, however, is that this cannot last much longer. I have seen Cupid and his arrows, and I know that he is widening his smile. He is taking aim with his arrow at my head, or my heart, and soon I will be undone again. And like Caravaggio, I will have nobody to blame but myself. “Love conquers all,” Cupid says, “so let us yield to love.” Despite the inevitability of defeat, and the painful hope of it all, I do.