A naked boy with dark, feathered wings grins at us as he steps down from a ledge draped in white satin, one knee raised, a bow and a bundle of arrows in his hand. At his feet, in deep shadow, lie a lute, a violin, a sheet of music, a compass and square, and a suit of black armor. The boy is Cupid, and the picture illustrates Virgil's line that love conquers all. Caravaggio painted it in 1601–02 for the Roman collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, using a model chosen from the common people.

The Berlin museum reads the objects, which also include a crown and scepter, as symbols of science, art, power and fame laid low by love. X-rays show that the blue, star-covered globe beneath Cupid was added later. The Wallace Collection in London, which showed the painting in 2025–26, suggests that Giustiniani's guests met it at the end of a tour of his gallery, revealed from behind a curtain. In 1815 the Prussian king bought the Giustiniani collection in Paris, and this picture entered the Berlin collections.

It is in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.