Amor Vincit Omnia

Amor Vincit Omnia ("Love Conquers All" in Latin, known in English by a variety of names including Amor Victorious, Victorious Cupid, Love Triumphant, Love Victorious, or Earthly Love) is a painting by the Italian Baroque artist Caravaggio. Amor Vincit Omnia shows Amor, the Roman Cupid, wearing dark eagle wings, half-sitting on or climbing down from what appears to be a table. Scattered around are the emblems of all human endeavors – violin and lute, armor, coronet, square and compasses, pen and manuscript, bay leaves, and flower, tangled and trampled under Cupid's foot. The painting illustrates the line from Virgil's Eclogues, Omnia Vincit Amor et nos cedamus amori ("Love conquers all; let us all yield to love"). A musical manuscript on the floor shows a large "V". It has therefore been suggested also that the picture is a reference to the achievements of Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani. Giustiniani is said to have prized it above all other works in his collection. Background The subject of Cupid was common for the age. Caravaggio's depiction of Cupid is unusually realistic – where other depictions, such as the contemporary Sleeping Cupid by Battistello Caracciolo, show an idealized, almost generic version. The dramatic chiaroscuro lighting and the photographic clarity, is the mingling of the allegorical and the real. Despite the clear indications of Caravaggio's practice of painting direct from a live model, there is an undeniable resemblance to the pose of Michelangelo's Victory now in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, and it is likely the artist had this in mind. The painter Orazio Gentileschi lent Caravaggio the wings as props to be used in the painting, and this allows fairly precise dating of 1602–03. It was an immediate success in the circles of Rome's intellectual and cultural elite. A poet immediately wrote three madrigals about it, and another wrote a Latin epigram in which it was first coupled with the Virgilian phrase Omnia Vincit Amor, although this did not become its title until the critic Giovanni Pietro Bellori wrote his life of Caravaggio in 1672.