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.

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记忆剪辑：卡拉瓦乔 1608 年的沉睡丘比特

卡拉瓦乔晚期的画作《沉睡的丘比特》长期以来一直被认为是对古代墓葬纪念碑上常见的沉睡丘比特的古色古香雕塑传统的模仿和逆转。这件作品是为一位佛罗伦萨赞助人准备的，被理解为有意扰乱了米开朗基罗关于这一主题的著名雕塑的艺术历史遗产。卡拉瓦乔将自己描述为一位不依赖艺术模仿的画家。然而，在这个例子中，他的大部分作品都在艺术史引用的边界上工作，这些引用然后令人烦恼，好像要撤销他们同时寻求模仿的工作。如果说沉睡的丘比特的古典太平间既是对生命温柔的纪念和生命逝去的制造者，那么卡拉瓦乔的“沉睡的丘比特”