Memory's Cut: Caravaggio's Sleeping Cupid of 1608

Abstract

Caravaggio's late painting, Sleeping Cupid, had long been recognized as a mimetic engagement, as well as a reversal, of the antique sculptural tradition of sleeping cupids that commonly decorated ancient funerary monuments. Destined for a Florentine patron, the work has been understood as intencionally troubling the art-historical legacy of Michelangelo's famous lost sculpture of this subject. Caravaggio described himself as a painter without recourse to artistic imitation. Yet much of his oeuvre, as in this instance, works at the boundaries of art-historical citations that are then vexed, as if to undo the work they seek simultaneously to emulate. If the classical mortuary figure of the sleeping cupid was at once a memorial of life's tenderness and maker of its passing, Caravaggio's Sleeping Cupid is instead like a fractured or ruptured memory, a shifting and unstable dream-like recollection of the past within the present.