Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss
Antonio Canova (1757-1822) · 1787-1793
Cupid has landed beside the body of Psyche and gathered her up, one hand cradling her head and the other beneath her breast, his wings still spread from the descent. Her arms rise to close the circle around his neck and the two faces stop a breath apart. The story comes from Apuleius: Psyche, sent to fetch a casket of beauty from the underworld, disobeyed and opened it, releasing a deadly sleep. Cupid pricked her with an arrow and roused her with a kiss. What is shown is the instant before contact, not the kiss itself.
The whole composition is built from two intersecting diagonals that make an X when seen from the front, with the crossed arms at the centre and a great open lozenge of space between the bodies. Canova polished the flesh with pumice and lead white until it holds light like wax, then deliberately left the rock beneath Psyche rougher so that the contrast registers. Look for the shallow undercut beneath her shoulder blade, where the marble is thinned almost to translucency, and for the finely toothed feathers of the wings, which are separate inserted pieces.
Colonel John Campbell commissioned the group in Rome in 1787, but it never reached him. Joachim Murat bought it in 1800 and installed it at his château of Villiers near Paris; after his execution in 1815 it passed to the French state and was placed in the Louvre in 1824. It became the defining image of Neoclassical sculpture and a touchstone for the Romantic generation, admired by Stendhal and copied endlessly in biscuit porcelain and bronze.
Did You Know? Canova mounted the group on a revolving base so that visitors could turn it by hand and follow the composition round, a piece of theatre the Louvre's fixed plinth no longer allows.
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