Caravaggio - Michelangelo Merisi - Oil This painting ("Love Conquers All") known in English by a variety of names including Amor Vincit Omnia, Victorious Cupid, Love Triumphant, Love Victorious, or Earthly Love. It shows Amor, the Roman Cupid, wearing dark eagle wings, half-sitting on or perhaps climbing down from what appears to be a table. Scattered around are the emblems of all human endeavours – violin and lute, armour, coronet, square and compasses, pen and manuscript, bay leaves, and an astral globe, tangled and trampled under Cupid’s foot. A musical manuscript on the floor shows a large "V". It has therefore been suggested that the picture is a coded reference to the attainments of Vincenzo Giustiniani: his Genoese family ruled Chios (until the island's capture by the Turks) in 1622, hence the coronet
the cultivated Marchese also wrote about music and painting (pen, manuscript and musical instruments), was constructing an imposing new palazzo (geometrical instruments), studied astronomy (astral sphere), and was praised for his military prowess (armour). The symbology thus holds the possible reading: Vincenzo Conquers All. Caravaggio’s treatment is remarkable for the realism of his Cupid. This Cupid is highly individual, quite apart from the dramatic chiaroscuro lighting and the photographic clarity, is the mingling of the allegorical and the real, this sense it gives of a child who is having a thoroughly good time dressing up in stage-prop wings with a bunch of arrows and having his picture painted.