The Watson Gordon Lecture 2016

Caravaggio’s astonishingly naturalistic and provocative Cupid Victorious hung in the palace of a famous family at the heart of seventeenth-century Rome. Helen Langdon explores how the artist, famed for his originality, created a balance between a suggestion of his own world – a world of lively and rowdy street life – and a complex and ambiguous response to both ancient and Renaissance art and literature. Langdon also looks at the challenge the painting threw out to contemporary painters, whose world was characterised by extreme and bitter rivalries; often they reject his irony, sometimes embellish the painting’s sexuality, and at other times convey an opposing sense of the harmony of the arts.