Pino Blasone
Eros and Psyche A Hermeneutic Circle
1 – Painted terracotta bust of Cupid embracing Psyche from Centuripe, Sicily: British Museum, London; ca. 200-100 B.C. The Soul and the Butterfly Falling in love to Love: even more than an idealization, there is a strange circularity in an assumption like that, almost a tautology. Already in the Hellenistic age (circa 200-100 B.C.E.), such a conceptual circularity had to be perceived by an unknown artist and found its figural realization in a Grecian artefact, discovered at Centuripe in Sicily and today in the British 1
Museum at London. It is an originally painted terracotta, a statuette of Eros and Psyche. Both of them are portrayed frontally, half length, and the former behind the latter. They are going to kiss each other. An arm of Psyche is raised over the god’s head, while his hands so embrace her bust as to form an oval framing, containing the whole composition. Much and much later, we will find nearly the same scheme in a famous artwork by Antonio Canova, Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss (Musée du Louvre, Paris; ca. 1787-93). Reliably the Italian sculptor could not see the ancient artefact from Centuripe, which was still buried, nor any analogous one. Was it a mere coincidence, or is that scheme so easily associable to the subject, as to be possibly repeated by different artists with an interval of so many centuries? An answer is even more problematic, if we consider that the statuette from Centuripe was made long before the only literary source we dispose about the myth of Eros and Psyche. This is the fable of Cupid and Psyche, inserted in the Latin novel Metamorphoses, or The Golden Ass, by Lucius Apuleius in circa 160 A.D. (Cupidus or Amor are Latin names for Eros, the Grecian god of love son to Aphrodite or Venus, goddess of beauty and love). Although an allusion to the legend is found already in the Latin novel Satyricon by Petronius, the only notice we have about a Greek account of it is in the 3 rd book of the Mitologiae by the late Latin mythographer and presumed North-African bishop Fulgentius. He writes of the relevant work by one Aristophontes of Athens. Unfortunately, nothing more we know about such a work or its author, or else the time when it was written. Thus, we have to refer to Apuleius’ novel, as well as doubtless Canova was inspired by it. As for the ancient artists, who were inspired by the same subject before Apuleius, they could have been influenced by the alleged work by Aristophontes, obviously if only it preceded Apuleius’ novel. Yet they might have been influenced by any other written or oral tradition.
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2 – Antonio Canova, Psyché ranimée par le baiser de l’Amour (“Psyche Revived by the Kiss of Love”); Musée du Louvre, Paris Such as told by the North-African writer and Platonic thinker Apuleius of Madaura, the story is a half way between a fairy tale and a philosophical affabulation. In particular Psyche, the name of the female protagonist, is the same term which in Greek means “soul” (and also “butterfly”; for this reason, in the iconographic tradition often she is depicted with butterfly wings, or a butterfly may be adopted as Psyche’s symbol). As to Eros, notoriously in Greek his name means “love”. He was usually personified as a boy with bird-like wings, a quiver hung on his shoulders, and a bow with arrows in his hands. Indeed, in our allegorical myth it was Eros to fall in love to Psyche first, since accidentally stung by one of his own magic darts, while admiring the young and beautiful princess. On one hand, we have a godhead perceived as love and beauty. On the other hand there is a human soul, which is initiated to the mysteries of divinity, by an interior experience contrasted between curiosity and fear. Other feelings as a maternal jealousy, by Aphrodite, and the envy, by Psyche’s sisters, are as many obstacles on her path of personal elevation. The end of the tale is apparently less pessimistic than that of the complementary Myth of the Cave, in The Republic by Plato. In this 3
apologue the male protagonist, likely inspired by the figure of Socrates, Plato’s unlucky teacher, had become a victim in the hands of his fellow prisoners themselves. In fact, they did not understand, believe or trust, his proclaimed discovery of an ideal-true world out of the cave and his attempt at liberating them from their illusions of a deceitful, mean reality. In Apuleius’ story, Psyche’s wandering this earth and the underworld, in search of her lost love, is doomed to a final failure, despite her terrible labours and successful efforts, because of her recurrent relapses into error. Just only thanks to Eros’ forgiveness and intervention itself, she gets save and achieves her aim. Apuleius’ religious scepticism is evident, about human capability to obtain redemption with no aid from a divine providence.
3 – Antonio Canova (or Gaspare Landi?), Amore e Psiche: Museo Correr, Venice; 1792 Not by chance, along the centuries iconography chiefly focused on three episodes of the narrative, for their pictorial potentiality: the nocturnal scene when Psyche lights a lamp in her lover’s presence to discover his true form, although he had warned her to never try to see his 4
face; the moment when she opens a fateful box containing the secret of beauty, which the goddess of the dead Persephone or Proserpine had given her, in order to deliver it intact to Aphrodite; the subsequent succour by Eros, who hastens to reach and wake her from an everlasting swoon. Most probably, this last one is the very subject of the terracotta from Centuripe and of the masterpiece by Canova above mentioned, as well as of a painting Amore e Psiche ascribed to the same author or to his friend Gaspare Landi (Museo Correr, Venice), showily imitating the same circular scheme, where Psyche is rising toward Eros’ lips like a moth reborn from its chrysalis. In the painting, also her butterfly wings are visible, whereas are absent in the statue. A butterfly as a symbol of the psyche returns in another sculpture by Canova, where a standing, reconciled Eros and Psyche, are observing it while resting on the palm of a hand of Eros (Musée du Louvre, Paris; 1796-1800). Even this detail is not new. We can find it already in a statue of the 2nd-1st century B.C. The only remarkable difference is that, in this case, the marble butterfly rests on a hand of Psyche. However, all of these images show an emblematic value and a certain autonomy from Apuleius’ text, with peculiar reference to the butterfly’s symbolism, tending to be somewhat enigmatic. Moreover, a lot of artworks on the theme of Eros and Psyche flourished since the late 18th century, when a theoretical debate about allegories and emblems developed in European artistic milieus. Insomuch, that our theme seems to be especially congenial to Neoclassic art. In Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, today at the Louvre, from a particular visual angle the rounding representation of the embracing arms appears inscribed in an approximate “X” traced by Eros’ open wings above, his legs and Psiche’s body lying down below, almost to conventionally suggest an unknown meaning in the whole composition. Even more than a revival of arcane meanings, indeed it looks an invitation to a renewed interpretation. Supposedly, that is what differentiates a creative imitation from a mere copy of classical models. Even better than old models, Canova re-elaborates mind’s archetypes.
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4 – Benjamin West, Cupid and Psyche: Private Collection;1808 Neoclassicism, or Pre-Romanticism? “Religion itself, in the earlier days of the world, would probably have failed in its progress without the arts of design, for religion was then emblematic; and what could an emblematic theology do without the aid of the fine arts, and especially the art of sculpture?”: so, the North-American artist Benjamin West, concerning the historical and topical importance of an “emblematic art”, in his Discourse to the Students of the Royal Academy of London of 1792. Of course, there were different opinions about what a kind of emblematism. In 1805 the Pre-Romantic painter Henry Fuseli, aka Johann Heinrich Füssli, wrote that it should have been moderately updated, in a comment he allowed the fellow artist William Blake to publish as recommendatory of his work as an illustrator of the poem The Grave by William Blair: “Animate and inanimate Nature, the seasons, the forest and the field, the bee and ant, the larva, chrysalis and moth, have lent their real or supposed analogies with the origin, pursuits and end, of the human race, so often to emblematical purposes, that instruction is become stale, and attention callous. [...] Aware of this, but conscious that affectation of originality and trite 6
repetition would equally impede his success, the Author of the moral series before us has endeavoured to wake sensibility by touching our sympathies with nearer, less ambiguous and less ludicrous imagery, than what mythology, Gothic superstition, or symbols as far-fetched as inadequate could supply”. Here, the philosophical background is that outlined by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, mostly in his treatises Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture or Attempt at an Allegory, with Special Regard to Art. The German art historian and archaeologist deemed “Nature herself” to be the teacher of allegory. As intercepted by fine arts and poetry, such a general language seemed to be more proper “to her” than signs later invented by men for communicating. Descending from oral traditions, mythology is integral part of this worldview, as an imaginative link between human nature and the whole of nature itself. Like for the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Winckelmann’s idea was of a way of life in accordance with nature even more than with reason, thus prefiguring a subsequent development in our civilization, that is the transition from Enlightenment to Romanticism. To a greater extent than for Rousseau, in his perspective the age of an ideal balance between nature and reason remained that of the ancient classic culture. Yet Füssli’s criticism sounds somewhat even more advanced than those of both Winckelmann and West.
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5 – François Pascal Simon Gérard, Psyché et l’Amour; Musée du Louvre, Paris (notice the detail of a butterfly, flying over Psyche) Nonetheless, still in 1810 the Anglo-Swiss artist painted an Amor und Psyche, currently in the Kunsthaus at Zurich. And, in his Lecture on the Art of the Moderns, he expressed his admiration for Raphael’s frescoes in the Loggia of Cupid and Psyche at the Villa Farnesina in Rome, specifying – in the Lecture about Invention, First Part – that “the allegory of Apuleius became a drama under the hand of Raphael”. Actually, the Amor und Psyche by Füssli looks very dramatic. It has no longer the geometric symmetry in the sculptural Psyche Revived by Canova, or else the studied harmony in the Renaissance art of Raphael. Rather, it marks the passage from a Neoclassic to an early Romantic pictorial sensitiveness. In such a painting, any emblematic value grows enigmatic and disquieting. Just to paraphrase a rhetorical figure by Winckelmann, the pathos has emerged from the depths at the surface. The allegorical circularity, between what signifies and what signified, is cracked. Eros is portrayed while succouring an exanimate Psyche on his arms, grievously gazing at her as if perplexed about his divine capability of reviving the object of his love. 8
Anyhow, a comparison of this artwork with that by Canova may help us to formulate a further interpretation of the latter, as a metaphor regarding the capability by a Neoclassic art, of reanimating the spirit of Classic culture, adapting it to modern civilization. The already uneasy dream of Winckelmann, to return to be like ancient Greeks in modern Europe, by a paradoxical imitation of the inimitable, does not make much sense any longer to an anglicized intellectual as Füssli, whereas in Germany that idealization exceeds into Johann Gottfried Herder’s nationalistic theorization that Hellenism will attain its latest triumphal manifestation in the realization of a German state. The symbolic forms begin to migrate from a cultural field to another, from religion to art or to politics, beyond conventional distinctions or future iconological classifications. Which sort of Eros was that of Füssli, the painter of nightmares or of hard erotic scenes, a translator of Winckelmann and an acquaintance of Rousseau, albeit follower of neither of them? Surely he was not Canova’s Platonic, Apollonian one, able to preserve or restore life forms. Although a minor god, long before Nietzsche his Dionysian task was to upset those forms in order to regenerate them.
6 – Johann Heinrich Füssli, also known as Henry 9
Fuseli, Amor und Psyche; Kunsthaus, Zurich Let us confront Amor und Psyche and another work by Füssli, more explicitly forerunning an end of the short Neoclassical season. That is a sepia wash, nearly monochromatic painting: The Artist Moved to Despair at the Grandeur of Antique Fragments (Kunsthaus, Zurich; ca. 1778-80). In this picture a man is seated near a marble foot and hand, which is pointing upwards. They are two of a few remains from a colossal statue of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, still now visible in the Musei Capitolini at Rome. Presumably the artist himself, that guy covers his face with one hand, while the other is hung down on the giant foot closer to him, as to signify an impossibility and absurdity – and maybe some a danger too – in reviving the Classic past. Beyond a rhetoric of loss or the nostalgia for a heroic ethics, the fragments themselves denounce what is lost and cannot be recovered at all: the full sight and intimate coherence of a complex, unrepeatable wholeness. It has been written too, Füssli as a painter was a precursor of Symbolism and even of Surrealism. For certain, he represented the Pre-Romantic side of a Neoclassic appearance. We have also a drawing by Füssli, titled Psyche, Amor mit der Lampe betrachtend. In it, a disconcerted Psyche holds a dagger in one hand and a lit lamp in the other, while beholding the sleeping Eros just before that a drop of hot oil falls from the lamp onto his shoulders, causing him to awaken and fly away. According to Apuleius’ tale, the presence of a dagger is justified with Psyche’s fear that her unknown lover could be a deceiving and anthropophagous monster, so as insinuated and warned by her envious sisters. Likely, what can be originally adumbrated in this episode is an invisibility or unrecognizablity of godhead, by not completely initiated eyes at least. Rather than an ancient mysterical sense, what we may perceive in the modern representation by Füssli is the difficulty to distinguish any alleged divine intuition from a demoniac possession. In her 1977 study Individuation in Fairy Tales, the Swiss Jungian psychoanalyst Marie-Louise von Franz wrote of an old regressive archetype always ready to haunt human minds. Unfortunately the medieval devil, she adds as an example, still possesses a seduction power to fascinate and involve masses of people, so as attested by some well known and tragic historical events of the 20th century.
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7 – Luca Giordano, Psyche Discovering the Sleeping Cupid; Royal Collection, London A Silver Lamp and a Golden Box Already in the Mannerist and Baroque iconography, the scene of Psyche with lamp and a sleeping, or awakening Eros, was quite frequent. For instance, it was depicted once by the Italians Jacopo Zucchi and Luca Giordano (respectively, in the Borghese Gallery, Rome: 1589; and in The Royal Collection, London: ca.1695-7); by the French Simon Vouet (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon; 1626), and twice by the Flemish artist Pieter Paul Rubens. Reliably the finest artwork on the theme is Cupid and Psyche, by Orazio Gentileschi (The Hermitage, St. Petersburg; 1628-30), although in this picture a lamp does not appear but only its glim, and Psyche is sitting in front of a waked Eros on an edge of their alcove. To a painter as the Italian Caravaggist, such a subject was an occasion for a game of light and shade including bare bodies. Yet also the attitude of the characters could be unconventional, as for these lovers, who seem to sadly discuss before a sorrowful and indeed “human, all too human” separation or forsaking. The gestures of their hands are speaking better than their lips. There is no doubt, what Psyche is claiming to the young god are the good reasons of human mind. Those reasons are men’s and women’s nature and right to inquire even about religious 11
faith, their impossibility to remain blind minded all the more when many of them were inquired and persecuted because of religious pretexts. We cannot forget, Gentileschi’s painting dates from the worst period of the Counter-Reformation, of the “Holy Inquisition”, of the witch hunt. Nor was it the Middle Ages, but the dark side of early modernity. Then, Psyche’s lamp or the light diffused by it could well be a cryptic symbol standing for a human reason struggling against obscurantism, almost anticipating the spirit of Enlightenment rising in the next century. Nevertheless in the same 17 th century we meet with another symbolic, pictorial object, consistent with Psyche’s myth as recounted by Apuleius. It can be discerned in Cupid and Psyche by the Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck (Kensington Palace, Royal Collection, London; ca. 1638). That is an open box in one hand of Psyche, lying down like dead on the ground while Eros flies and runs to rescue her. In Apuleius’ narration it is a resolving episode, just preceding the happy ending of the fable.
8 – Middleton Alexander Jameson, Cupid and Psyche: Private Collection; 1898 Among the trials imposed by the immortal Aphrodite on the mortal Psyche, in order to stifle her own rage and to regain her son’s confidence, the last and hardest was a catabasis. In Greek mythology, that is a “descent” of a living person to the underworld. The goddess gave 12
Psyche a box to bring to Persephone, together with the prayer to fill it with a balm which preserves beauty. The queen of the dead did as asked, and our heroine was just back to see the sunlight, when she could not resist the temptation to open the box, and to use a bit of that magic for herself, before of consigning it to Aphrodite. Yet what exhaled out of it was only a bewitched smoke, insinuating into her a lethal drowsiness. It has been argued, this is the most feminine episode of the legend. In an introduction to Problems of the Feminine in Fairytales (1972), referring to the whole digression on Psyche in search of Eros within the novel by Apuleius, Marie-Louise von Franz objects that a female protagonist or context does not necessarily imply that a story reflects women’s reality. Not seldom it concerns a male projection of women, or a feminine component in masculine psychology. Anyway, that projection or component is what in Jungian psychology is defined as Anima, the Latin word for “soul”, that is the Greek “psyche”. Undoubtedly Apuleius’ heroine represents the psyche. When she incurs into a faulty curiosity or vanity, this sin is attributed by the Platonist author not so much to a specific female weakness, as rather and generally to an imperfection in human minds. The initial suspicion of Psyche toward her unknowable lover is amply justifiable by rational motives and a legitimate, albeit somewhat mystic, aspiration to the divine vision. Nor are similar folk tales lacking, here incidentally speaking, where it is a man to discover a female mysterious lover and not vice versa. Instead the latter Psyche’s failing is far less justifiable, but not less problematic, if we consider that the content of the box incautiously opened by Psyche may be interpreted as the the sacred in itself. Whenever that hermetic container happens to be forced, its content might reveal itself not as the expected divinity we are longing for, but even as a dangerous superstition. In one sense, the message which Apuleius handed down to us is a hermeneutic and vicious circle.
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9 – Orazio Gentileschi, Cupid and Psyche; The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg In a synthetic way, we may dare to affirm, the lamp and the box symbolize respectively the conscience and the unconscious. Beside the butterfly and the lamp, the golden box became a recurring ingredient in the Eros and Psyche iconography. Sometimes it assumes the shape of a jar, like that borne by the penitent Magdalene in a Christian religious and pictorial tradition. Such are the cases of statues as Psyche with Three Cupids by the Dutch Mannerist sculptor Adriaen de Vries (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; bronze, ca. 1593), and the less bizarre Psyche with the Jar od Beauty by the Danish Neoclassic artist Albert Bertel Thorvaldsen (Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin; marble, 1806), or else Amor und Psyche by the Swiss Neoclassic paintress Angelica Kauffmann (Vorarlberger Landesmuseum, Bregenz; 1792). Yet it will be the symbolist art of the British Pre-Raphaelites, to be particularly attracted by the relationship of Psyche with the forbidden box. In the oil on canvas Cupid Delivering Psyche by Edward Burne-Jones (Sheffield Art Gallery, U.K.; ca. 1871), the precious case catches the eye in the left down corner of the picture, even if it does not look golden at all. Like for Canova’s most celebrated sculpture, the central scene is wrapped in some a circularity of the composition, but here the effect is dramatic. This dramaticity still seems to evaporate from the open box. Still closed, the box shows up at the centre of the composition already in paintings as 14
Psyche in Hades by the French Paul Alfred de Curzon (City Hall, Sermaize-les-Bains, France; about 1840-59), and Artist’s Psyche by the Greek Nikolaos Gysis (or Gyzis, 1842-1901; location and date unknown). Whereas in this latest depiction a butterfly winged Psyche looks pensive and hesitant, as if she has not yet made up her “mind” about, finally we have a Psyche Opening the Golden Box in a work by the English painter John William Waterhouse (Private Collection; ca.1903). Indeed, even better than the outcome of a profane frivolity, this seems to be that of a suffered and deliberate choice. The enchantment is broken, but a fatal risk to run has been accepted. It has been often and romantically said that the moral of the fable is the progress from a physical love or sex, Eros, to a more spiritual conception, expressed by Psyche as a decayed and restored goddess of the soul. Sure, it may be true. Yet the myth is also a parable leading to an open eyes love and faith, of a conscience which can wearily prevail over the perils of the unconscious, without repressing its positive forces and our potentiality of living a full life, maybe thanks to any transcendental help too.
10 – Patricia Watwood, Psyche’s Doubt; 2004: see the Website at http://www.patriciawatwood.com/wp/?attachment_id=318 Psyche, the “Latest Born” When Apuleius in The Golden Ass annotated that the Eros and Psyche story was the latest born Grecian myth, most probably he did not realize that – in his own version or re-elaboration 15
– it was the last one of the Greco-Roman civilization, and that it could work nearly as an interface between an antiquity at twilight and the next Middle Ages, or even modernity itself. Not so much later, that mythology was replaced by the Christian religion and culture. Although cleansed from erotic “excesses” and allegorized in a new edifying sense, that we are concerned with among pagan myths did not displease too much Christian writers as the above mentioned Fulgentius in his Mitologiarum libri (III 6; ca. A.D. 500). Nonetheless, after Giovanni Boccaccio’s treatise On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles, the myth was actually discovered again in the Renaissance period. In an “auto sacramental” drama of 1640, Psiquis y Cupido, the Spanish playwright Calderón de la Barca fully Christianized the theme. An incentive more, to consider and illustrate it, was Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon, a 1669 paraphrase of Apuleius’ text by the French fabulist Jean de La Fontaine. The tragedy-ballet Psyché, by Molière, Corneille, Quinault, Lully, was first performed at Paris in 1671 and in 1768 developed into one of the early modern operas, with music by Jean-Baptiste Lully. In the Romantic period, the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England and Alphonse de Lamartine in France were both fascinated by the symbolism of the soul as a butterfly: the former, in a short lyric titled Psyche (1808); the latter, in an insertion inside his philosophical poem La mort de Socrate (“The Death of Socrates”, 1823). A Christianization of the symbols as well as of the whole myth attains here its apex, even if the formal frame remains that of the ancient Platonism, such as affabulated by Apuleius. Let us read the initial passage, describing the cup of hemlock which Socrates was condemned to drink: Sur les flancs arrondis du vase au large bord,/ Qui jamais de son sein ne versait que la mort,/ L’artiste avait fondu sous un souffle de flamme/ L’histoire de Psyché, ce symbole de l’âme;/ Et, symbole plus doux de l’immortalité,/ Un léger papillon en ivoire sculpté,/ Plongeant sa trompe avide en ces ondes mortelles,/ Formait l’anse du vase en déployant ses ailes (“Upon the vase’s border, and round sides,/ Which bears the liquid, for whom death abides,/ The artist cast, under a wreath of flame,/ The soul’s true symbol, Psyche, and her fame./ And, emblem clear of immortality,/ A Butterfly, sculptured in ivory,/ With greedy bill reaching the deadly juice,/ His spreading wings a handle to the vase”; trans. Eliza Winchell Smith).
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11 – Edward Burne-Jones, Cupid Delivering Psyche; Sheffield Art Gallery, Sheffield, U.K. Evidently the Neoclassic lesson had so penetrated the literary Romanticism, also by its figurative forms, that not seldom these were rendered in a dramatized and exaggerated manner. More pertinent and gentler, the Ode to Psyche by the English poet John Keats was first published in 1820, and anticipated in 1817 by a delightful passage in I Stood tip-toe upon a little hill: “So felt he, who first told, how Psyche went/ On the smooth wind to realms of wonderment;/ What Psyche felt, and Love, when their full lips/ First touch’d; what amorous and fondling nips/ They gave each other’s cheeks; with all their sighs,/ And how they kist each other’s tremulous eyes:/ The silver lamp,– the ravishment,– the wonder –/ The darkness,– loneliness,– the fearful thunder;/ Their woes gone by, and both to heaven upflown,/ To bow for gratitude before Jove’s throne”. In this verse, we can easily recognize another significant symbol in the original legend: the “silver lamp”. The last two lines allude to its happy ending, when the king of gods grants Eros that Psyche may become immortal. In this sense, she was the latest born goddess, or the sacred figure of a deified human soul. Such will be the theme of the Ode to Psyche, a masterpiece of Romantic poetry. In the subliminal sensitiveness typical of the best Romanticism, notoriously the perception of an individual, unique soul, grew very important. Yet what quite transparent in the verse by Keats 17
is a paradoxical impression: that, the more one achieves a true knowledge of his own self, the better he is susceptible of being gratified with the contemplation of an universal mind. As intuitable, that is a reasonable feeling rather than a rational knowledge. Especially, we cannot give other plausible meaning to not few lines, like those where the poet imagines to address his hymn directly to the ancient Greek heroine: “Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see/ The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes?/ [...]/ O latest born and loveliest vision far/ Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy!/ [...]/ Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane/ In some untrodden region of my mind,/ Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,/ Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind”. It sounds almost a prayer, or the introduction to a prayer, emerging from the depths of the unconscious up to the surface of conscience.
12 – Nikolaos Gysis (or Gyzis, 1842-1901), Artist’s Psyche; location and date unknown The Story of Cupid and Psyche is also a section in The Earthly Paradise, by the PreRaphaelite poet and artist William Morris (1868–70). In a list of literary re-visitations, it 18
should not be missing Psyche, from the collection Convivial Poems by the Italian Symbolist Giovanni Pascoli (1904). In this composition the topic is treated in a pessimistic and morbid way, according to a Decadent cultural fashion. The female protagonist returns to be no longer a semi-goddess or a fairy princess, but a human being so humble as to be “slighter than a slight shade which the smoke/ casts down on the ground while fading up in the sky”. She is the victim of an unlucky love. The poet so tells her: “In the dark with him you lay/ while docilely shuddering, but at last/ lit your small lamp daring gaze at him,/ alert in his sound beastly sleep./ And that beast was none but Love./ Yet you knew it only when he vanished,/ that winged Love”. Here Pan, the beastlike deity which in Apuleius’ account was a secondary character, becomes – to use a Jungian term – the “Shadow” of Eros. What there was a marginal episode, that is an attempt at suicide by the disconsolate Psyche, turns into a tragic ending, by joining love and death together. The setting is that of a wild, vital but ungenerous country nature. And every human mind’s effort of giving it a specular, lovely face, got unfortunately failed. We like to comment with a less sad observation, somewhat contradicting the clashing separation between “carnal” and spiritual love which distinguishes some Christianized and even Romantic renovations of Platonism. The last words of Apuleius’ tale inform us that Psyche bore Eros a daughter, who in Latin was named Voluptas, what means hēdonē in Greek and “pleasure” in English. In ancient iconography, already preceding Apuleius’ work, she was depicted as butterfly winged, just like for her mother. In the dialogue Philebus by Plato (section 12b), Socrates mentioned this deity Hedone, soon after specifying that there exist various types of pleasure she could symbolize: enjoyment, delight, sensual pleasure... Thus, each one of us is allowed to adopt its aspect congenial to him. It is strange how the earliest modern erotic writer, Boccaccio, gave a mystic interpretation: the love affair between a redeemed Psyche and an angelized Cupid generated Voluptas, which stands for contemplative bliss and eternal gladness. “Eternal” or “angel bride” is also Psyche, in the verse by John Milton and Thomas Kibble Hervey. From a full accordance of our souls with love, with all the more reason we may reply, a durable joy of living ought to be a sufficient fruit!
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13 – John William Waterhouse, Psyche Opening the Golden Box; Private Collection Animus and Anima From an iconological point of view, and on compositional grounds at least, we can even try a comparison with the iconography of the Annunciation of the archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary, especially such as it flourished in the 16 th and 17th centuries, that is in the Manneristic and Baroque art. Concerning this theme, it can be objected that we are trespassing onto the ground of the sacred. We may reply that also the Eros and Psyche iconography was originally born as a sacred one, albeit in the ambit of a heathen religiosity. Actually, few other analogous subjects are so susceptible to be symbolically affected, in the iconographic tradition. What we are exploring are representations not only of episodes of the pagan mythology or of the sacred history, but of an evolution of the perception of the sacred itself, in the development of Western civilization and its figurative culture. In this trip into an archetypal imagery, again
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Jungian psychology can support us, in particular by its concepts of Animus and Anima. In Latin, both terms mean “soul”, but the former is masculine whereas the latter is feminine gendered. According to Carl Gustav Jung, respectively they refer to male and female components deep inside our psyches. In different measure depending on the sex gender, each person possesses both those images. We are used to project the related ideals onto others. There is no reason to think that something alike does not happen, with that absolute – but not completely unfamiliar – otherness, which mainly is our intuition of the divine or the sacred. Nay, it is there that the connection of the couple Animus-Anima tendentially balances into a perfect whole, as a virtual and virtuous mirror of the personal self. Altough on different degrees, in such a perspective we may consider not few representations of Eros and Psyche as well as of the announcing angel and the Virgin Annunciate. Let us begin with the figure of the Animus. A substantial diversity is that in the former case Eros was the god of love, whereas in the latter we have only a messenger of divine love. Formally, either of them is usually represented as a winged and handsome youth, although the angel’s attitude is much more respectful toward the female character of the scene. For instance, not less than Psyche, Eros is often portrayed naked or bare looking, on the contrary of the angel and – obviously – of his visited maid. Yet is it always true? In the Mannerist and Baroque painting, not seldom that angel is robed or strutting like a page boy, for example in the Annunciations by the Italian paintress Lavinia Fontana (Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore; before 1577) and by her Flemish colleague Michaelina Wautier (Musée Promenade Marly-le-Roi, Louveciennes; 1659), or else by the French enameller Suzanne de Court (Walters Art Gallery; ca. 1600).
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14 – Ricardo Mazal, Psyche Opening the Box; 2004: see the Website at http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~mjoseph/CP/ICP.html They were not woman artists alone, to work in such an ingenuous or ambiguous way. Italian Mannerist painters, as Francesco Mazzola called Parmigianino and followers, were used to depict ephebic and half bare angels of the Annunciation. Let us think of The Annunciation attributed to the Parmigianino, currently in the Metropolitan Museum of Art at New York, and of that very similar by Girolamo Mazzola Bedoli in the Museo di Capodimonte at Naples, or else of a later one by Giulio Cesare Procaccini dating from 1620 and now in the Musée du Louvre at Paris. Doubtless, these angels may resemble as many Cupids. There is even one sample, where Eros and the angel of the Annunciation look merged into one inspiring figure. That is an Allégorie de la peinture by the French artist Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy (“Allegory of Painting”: Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon; ca. 1650), also author of a Horatian fashioned poem titled Remarques sur l’art de la peinture or, in Latin, De arte graphica. Nor had all this to appear too irreverent, according to an already Baroque principle that a certain tamed sensuality may concur to illustrate and vulgarize even the spirituality intrinsic in 22
the representation of sacred subjects. By the way, erotic figures with an allegoric sense were not lacking in the mystic writings of that epoch. Of course, when artists like those occurred to deal with the Eros and Psyche theme, their way was far freer and easier. The Parmigianino himself painted one Cupid Carving his Bow at least (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; 1532-34), and it is so fine as to be second only to a famed analogous painting by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio in the Gemaeldegalerie at Berlin: Amor Vincit Omnia (ca. 1601-02). Nevertheless the mythic figure of Eros has one disadvantage at least, if compared with the announcing angel, what has to do with the function itself of the latter. In the Eros and Psyche myth, he is a mysterious lover and ultimate rescuer, but a simple visitor too, whereas in the evangelical account Gabriel is yes a declared messenger but also a hopeful announcer. If we consider well, it is this not minor detail which makes him a more dynamic image of Animus, better compatible with modernity. Not by chance, so many Annunciation paintings just date to the beginnings of modern age. Paradoxically the success of the archangel was due not only to religious motives, but also to the circumstance that he stands for a historical projection toward the future, rather than to be a timeless, fabulous dream of the past. He announces Jesus’ birth, but a new era too and a progressive perception of time. It is between such suitors, that the collective Anima of Western civilization made her choice. And it was a wager not immune from recurrent and rethinking nostalgias, to which we gave names as Classicism, Neoclassicism, or even Post-Modernism and so on... At last, let us focus on the concept of Anima, such as identifiable with the images of Psyche or of the Virgin Mary.
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15 – Edward Burne-Jones, Pan and Psyche: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; ca. 1872-74 In their respective works Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine (1956) and The Golden Ass of Apuleius: The Liberation of the Feminine in Man (1970), Jungian authors as Erich Neumann and M.-L. Von Franz widely studied the connections between the fictional character re-created by Apuleius and a living human soul. Instead, it was C. G. Jung himself to write about the Virgin Mary, not so much as historical Jesus’ mother or a sacred icon; rather, as a symbolic modality to perceive the female, particularly within male psyches. In his essay Die Psychologie der Übertragung (“The Psychology of the Transference”, 1946), the Swiss psychoanalyst annotates that Mary is the personification of a “heavenly” relationship and that this “stage raises Eros to the heights of religious devotion and thus spiritualizes him”. Eros or angel, embodied or spiritualized, this changing Animus keeps a dialectic relationship with his complementary Anima. If in the ancient and classicistic art the former type of relationship is expressed by so many statues of Eros and Psyche embracing each other, in the Italian 17th century painting we can well associate the latter type to some 24
Annunciations by Guido Reni and followers, where the spiritual correspondence between Gabriel and Mary assumes almost the intensity of an intimate specularity. Generally in the history of European painting, nice landscapes with Psyche, inspired by various episodes of Apuleius’ legend, are not lacking: by P. P. Rubens and Paul Bril (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid; 1610), by Claude Lorraine (National Gallery, London; 1664), by Jean-Joseph-Xavier Bidault (Louvre, Paris; 1819). They all attest a peculiar sensitiveness of the Baroque or Romantic art, regarding a panic relation between myths – in particular, the myth of human soul – and nature. Yet here we like to conclude with another iconographic topos, that of Psyche temporarily abandoned by her loving Love, such as represented by the sculptors Jacques-Augustin Pajou and Pietro Tenerani (Louvre, Paris: 1785; and Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Florence: 1819), or by the painter Dosso Dossi (UniCredit Group Collection, Milan; ca. 1525). This is a figure of forsaking, of solitude and nostalgia, not less than that of Ariadne abandoned by Theseus before that she was consoled by the god Dionysus, according to another often represented Hellenic myth. Whereas in the latter case we deal with the absence of a human person, indeed in the former this grievous vacancy is of godhead itself.
16 – Claude Gellée, better known as Claude Lorraine, Landscape with Psyche outside the Palace of Cupid or The Enchanted Castle; National Gallery, London Copyright
[email protected] 2010 For an updated information about this topic, see Maria Grazia Bernardini (edited by), The Tale 25
of Cupid and Psyche: Myth in Art from Antiquity to Canova, Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2012; catalogue of a recent exhibition at the National Museum of Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome. Articles by the above author on like topics, at the Websites below: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2531940/Space-and-Time-of-the-Annunciation http://www.scribd.com/doc/2681466/The-Cat-and-the-Angel-of-the-Annunciation http://www.scribd.com/doc/2913375/The-Hands-of-Mary-States-of-Mind-in-the-Annunciate http://www.scribd.com/doc/2988387/Hail-Mary-Nazarene-and-PreRaphaelite-Annunciations http://www.scribd.com/doc/3817130/Women-and-Angels-Female-Annunciations http://www.scribd.com/doc/4597267/Byzantine-Annunciations-An-Iconography-of-Iconography http://www.scribd.com/doc/5837944/Marian-Icons-in-Rome-and-Italy http://www.scribd.com/doc/8650381/The-Flight-into-Egypt-A-Transcontinental-Trip http://www.scribd.com/doc/9568413/A-Long-Way-to-Emmaus-Almost-a-Samaritan-Story http://www.scribd.com/doc/11517241/The-Bodily-Christ http://www.scribd.com/doc/12902607/Magdalenes-Iconography http://www.scribd.com/doc/15057438/Marys-Gaze-in-the-History-of-Art http://www.scribd.com/doc/14136622/Mimesis-in-Ancient-Art http://www.scribd.com/doc/16420824/Thinkers-in-a-Landscape http://www.scribd.com/doc/19582647/Figures-of-Absence-in-the-History-of-Art http://www.scribd.com/doc/24221344/The-Smile-of-the-Sacred http://www.scribd.com/doc/26251175/On-the-Traces-of-Alcestis http://www.scribd.com/doc/28930322/Trains-and-Trams-An-Archaeology-of-Modernity http://www.scribd.com/doc/2075273/Italy-through-a-Gothic-Glass
17 – Giovanni di Niccolò de’ Luteri, better known as Dosso Dossi, Psyche Abandoned by Cupid; UniCredit Group Collection, Milan
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