Caravaggio’s Smirking God Comes to London

The Wallace Collection has secured an extraordinary loan: Victorious Cupid, Caravaggio’s audacious, mischievous painting of around 1601–02, shown in Britain for the first time. On loan from Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, the work will form the centrepiece of an intimate exhibition opening in late November. It will be presented alongside two ancient Roman sculptures that once stood beside it more than four centuries ago—classical companions that once framed, but never restrained, Cupid’s unruly presence.

The story behind the painting is as dramatic as the image itself. Victorious Cupid originally belonged to Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, a polymath collector, philosopher, and banker of immense wealth, who lived with his brother, Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani, in a vast palace near the Pantheon. Their residence was legendary: candlelit rooms lined with tapestries and a private collection that included at least fourteen works by Caravaggio. Far from being hidden, Victorious Cupid occupied pride of place in Giustiniani’s stanza grande de’ quadri antichi—a grand gallery of ancient paintings—alongside The Lute Player, an Inspiration of Saint Matthew whose angel borders on the erotic, and masterpieces by Raphael, Giorgione, Titian, and Andrea del Sarto.

Below, Giustiniani’s sculpture gallery offered an encyclopaedic display of ancient statuary, arranged with theatrical intelligence and scholarly ambition. He was not merely amassing objects; he was constructing arguments. His galleries were meant to provoke delight and intellectual tension in equal measure.

The painting itself was startling in its own time. A nearly life-size boy—likely around twelve years old—stands naked before us, wings affixed, arrows in hand, his grin hovering between flirtation and mockery. This is no idealised putto but a figure painted directly from life. At his feet lie scattered instruments, armour, mathematical tools, wreaths—emblems of power, knowledge, culture, and conquest—overturned by love’s supremacy. Behind him, a celestial globe cuts through the composition, a visual joke with cosmic stakes: even the world bends to desire.

Caravaggio’s Victorious Cupid (1601–02) arrives in London as a major loan from the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.Photo courtesy of the Wallace Collection, London.

The Wallace Collection’s curatorial strategy aims to recreate the sensation of entering the Giustiniani palace itself. Architectural illusion, printed city views, maps, and classical references conjure a Rome that feels close at hand. This was Caravaggio’s Rome: dense, volatile, nocturnal, and brilliant—a city where taverns, studios, chapels, violence, rivalry, and genius coexisted within walking distance. The exhibition gestures toward that compressed intensity, where brilliance and danger were inseparable.

Crucially, visitors will be able to view Victorious Cupid in direct dialogue with the accompanying Roman sculptures, restoring the comparison Giustiniani intended. This is more than display—it revives the intellectual game of paragone, the competition between ancient and modern art, sculpture and painting, marble and flesh. There is even speculation that the painting was once concealed behind a curtain, dramatically revealed to heighten its impact—a Baroque theatrical device designed to shock before electricity existed.

Caravaggio created the work at the height of his fame. Demand for his paintings was fierce; so too were envy and fear. Contemporary viewers marvelled at the luminous flesh tones, the startling realism, the psychological charge. Despite the painting’s blunt nudity, there is little record of scandal—perhaps admiration outweighed moral alarm, or discretion prevailed.

Soon after, everything changed. In 1606, Caravaggio killed a man during a street fight and fled Rome. His final years were spent moving between patrons, courts, and temporary refuge, until his mysterious death in 1610, reportedly collapsing near Porto Ercole as he attempted to return.

Dr Xavier Bray, Director of the Wallace Collection, describes Victorious Cupid as “the ultimate Caravaggio painting,” a fusion of sacred and profane, rendered in glowing flesh and deep shadow. He promises an exhibition that “evokes the Palazzo Giustiniani and the world of 17th-century Rome.” If even part of that ambition is realised, this will rank among London’s most compelling winter exhibitions: an opportunity to confront a grinning god who conquered intellect, power, and culture with nothing more than skin, arrows, and audacity.

Caravaggio’s Victorious Cupid

26 November 2025 – 12 April 2026

The Wallace Collection, London

Admission: FREE