Caravaggio’s Victorious Cupid and the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
Interesting online lecture from the Wallace Collections discussing how Caravaggio’s “Victorious Cupid” came to be in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. Neil McGregor, former director of the National Gallery and now chair of the advisory board of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, was interviewed by Xavier Bray, director of the Wallace Collection to mark the Wallace Collections showing the painting, on loan from the Berlin gallery. They began by talking about the picture itself with Bray sharing that the gallery was not allowed a poster of the painting for the show unless they put the label over the boys genitals. They talked about the Giustiniani brothers who commissioned the work and about other works by Caravaggio which they owned. They then discussed hat happened to the collection when it was sold in Paris in 1812 and how it was shown there for a number of years almost as a public show and how it influenced French artists of the time. We then went into a rather complex discussion of ...