CARAVAGGIO’S “AMOR TERRENO”
Art (still) exceeds morals
by Gerard Ruis
The following article was published in issue 3 of Koinos, Amsterdam, 1993, pp. 4-6. The original article’s black-and-white illustration of the painting under discussion has been replaced by colour ones of it and the artist.
Scarcely does a painting render better the earthly love by a man for a twelve year-old boy as in Vincit Omnia Amor (“love conquers all”), also known as Amor Terreno (“earthly love”), by Michelangelo da Caravaggio (really Michelangelo Merisi). This oil painting was commissioned by the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani in 1601, who later added it to his collection. In 1815, Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia bought the painting. Since that time it has been on show at the gallery of the Staatlichen Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin-Dahlem.

The painting shows a life-size cupid in the figure of a twelve year-old boy sitting on a celestial globe. In his right hand, he is holding a bow and arrow, his left arm largely hidden behind his body. Most striking are the large brown eagle’s wings. All sorts of objects lie scattered around the boy on the ground: a Cremona violin, a lute and a score as well as a ruler and a compass on the right-hand side, armour, a laurel wreath and books in front of him. Most provocative of all, however, is the boy himself, who with a roguish grin displays his full-frontal nudity and thereby sticks out his tiny sexual organ to the viewer.
This last point leads one to suppose that the interest in the boy is homoerotic and in view of his age paederastic. Richard Symons, travelling in Rome in 1650 wrote of the boy in his diary “the boy depicted was Caravaggio’s own boy. It was the body and face of his servant, with whom he slept.” Symons is unable to tell us, however, who the boy in 1602 actually was. According to the rumours in Rome at the time, Giovanni Battista had the reputation of being Caravaggio’s lover, but more probably, the boy depicted is Francesco Garzone, who acted as a twelve year-old model and later became a pupil of Caravaggio. In the art-world he is known as Cecco (an abbreviation of Francesco) da Caravaggio. Caravaggio continued to deny a paederastic relationship, but from another source, we know that the relationships with his pupils became steadily more intense. The young artist Mario Minniti managed to escape from Caravaggio by marrying, Lionello Spada by moving to another town. Homosexuality almost certainly formed an aspect of Caravaggio’s sexuality, although a relationship wih one Lena proves that it was not the only one.
Historians have for centuries tried to disprove the notion of homosexuality, even though the erotic radiation of the boy is denied by almost nobody. That this painting differs to those of his counterparts of the time, is illustrated by the fact that in the gallery of the Marquis Giustiniani, it was veiled. Officially this was done so that the other paintings would not be thrown in the shadow, but we can suppose that prudery and caution played a more primary role. In 1621 the art lover and doctor Giulio Mancini wrote an introduction for daring paintings which has not lost its validity: “One should pay great attention to when and where one displays a painting. One should pay particular attention that daring paintings are placed in the galleries of the gardens or back rooms and that the really daring paintings should be placed in discrete locations, when, if the gentleman of the house was a family man, he should keep it covered and only unveil it in the presence of his wife, or with somebody of no scruples.”

Caravaggio’s boy is certainly no ideal figure in the classic sense, but a being of flesh and blood. In this way, Caravaggio breaks radically from the opinion of his time that the components of a painting, including the boys depicted, should symbolise higher values. Where boys in the paintings of his counterparts subordinate themselves to classical values, Caravaggio’s boy manages to champion these very same values. He triumphs over intellectual life, specifically music (hence the lute, violin and score), geometry (represented by the ruler and compass) and astronomy (the boy is sitting on and not next to the celestial globe). He also triumphs, however, over the active life of the military (the armour) and of intellectuals (the book). Finally, the laurel wreath indicates that the boy even triumphs over glory. The fact that there are no painting materials to be seen in this work, customary among his counterparts of the time, fits neatly into this framework. Love remains a friend to the arts and consequently the boy cannot triumph over that and so the arts manage to escape the parody encapsulated here by Caravaggio. By distancing himself from the pompous rhetoric of his counterparts, Caravaggio reduces the boy to his true proportions: an earthly twelve year-old boy who symbolises the victory of the earthly love of the flesh.
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