'Amore e Psiche' (Cupid and Psyche)



Giuseppe Maria Crespi
Amore e Psiche ('Cupid and Psyche'), 1707 – 1709
Oil on canvas, w215 cm x h130 cm (84.64" x 51.18"
Located in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy

Link to zoom-able image: Google Cultural Institute
On location: Virtual Uffizi (the big painting at the end of the room on the left)

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The Roman-eramyth of Cupid and Psyche1, condensed-ish: Psyche is born the youngest princess in a royal family, and her beauty is so perfect that people begin traveling to see *her*, rather than worship Venus. In a jealous rage, Venus sends her son Cupid to pierce Psyche with a love-arrow while she sleeps, intending to make her fall in love with an ugly monster. Instead, Cupid is taken aback at her beauty, and accidentally pierces himself. He leaves and doesn't tell Venus...but meanwhile, Psyche's parents still can't find a match for her (as Venus is still preventing *love* arising from her visitors' admiration). They go to the oracle, oracle says to take Psyche to the top of a mountain, where a creature feared by gods and men will marry her. Psyche, knowing that Venus is angered and sad that her people have become wrong in their worship, goes voluntarily to the 'monster' she believes awaits her. 

Instead, the wind carries her to a secret forest, where she finds a golden palace with invisible servants tending to her every whim. At night, her new husband (Cupid) comes to her, vowing to love, cherish, and provide for her in every way but insisting on one thing – that she can never see him. Psyche obeys him, comes to love him and it's fine for awhile, but one day she begins to hear her sisters' voices crying for her on the mountain she was carried off from. She eventually begs her husband to let her see her sisters and show them that she's okay. He tells her it's a bad idea, but agrees. When her sisters are brought to the palace, they become jealous of her new life and her love for her husband – picking up on the fact that she has no idea what he looks like, they tell her he's probably a hideous beast and that's why he won't let her look. They also suggest that, being a beast, he's probably getting ready to kill her. They go back, but Psyche is sufficiently freaked out that one night, she keeps a lantern hidden by the bed [and in some versions of the story, a knife]. When he's asleep, she lights the lantern to look at her husband...who turns out to be the most beautiful of the gods. She is startled, there is a second accidental arrow-piercing — and hot wax spills from the candle, waking Cupid and injuring him. In pain and immediately seeing her betrayal, he flies away, and the palace vanishes.

Sick with love, Psyche searches for Cupid and eventually asks for Venus' help out of desperation. Venus still hates her and sets her a series of impossible tasks to finish before Venus will consider helping (which she doesn't intend to do anyway). Various sympathetic gods help Psyche accomplish the tasks, and Cupid (now recovered and still in love) escapes his mother's house to look for her. After one of the tasks almost kills her, Cupid revives Pscyhe and goes to ask for Jupiter's direct intervention. Jupiter convenes an assembly of the gods, where he gives his blessing to the marriage, warns Venus to stay out of it, and makes Psyche immortal. Cupid and Psyche live happily ever after.

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So narrative art2, the stuff I aspire to do. Narrative art is pretty much what it says on the tin — art that uses visual imagery to depict (or at least suggest) a story.

Looking specifically at narrative *painting*, one of the hallmarks of a well-done work is that there's a sort of 'efficiency' in the way it presents itself. There are at least three levels to this efficiency:

First, economy of story. In any storybook, if you ignore the strictly-plot-parts (who went where, who stabbed whom, etc.), there are ideas that the story is 'about'. These are the themes of the story – life vs. death, love vs. hate, war, honor, forgiveness, courage, crime, redemption, and so on. A narrative painting tells a story and has themes in its own way, but unlike a book, a painting only gets a single (wordless!) moment to make its themes clear. 'Economy of story' means that when an artist has a narrative they want to depict, they have to find the theme(s) that most drive that story, and then choose a narrative moment that will reveal only those themes, as powerfully as possible. (I tend to think of this as finding a solid 'narrative knot', as if themes were threads you could run your fingers along to feel where they tangle.)

Second, economy of design. The artist has to depict their chosen narrative moment using as simple and unified a composition as possible. This means finding one primary center of interest and designing the rest of the image to pull your eye around in a *meaningful* way, always leading back to that center of interest. This further means having NO superfluous elements. The artist needs to carefully consider which figures/objects they include, what the lighting will highlight or hide, etc., because every visual addition to the composition needs to play a role in helping to guide the viewer's attention around. ('Economy of design' is sometimes easier to define by what it isn't, so for the opposite effect, just look at any “Where's Waldo”-type picture, where as many things have been crammed in as possible to randomly fight for your attention.)

Third, economy of paint. In the physical application of paint, the artist should be trying to 'get the most' out of each brushstroke. This may mean using very little paint, but artists who use a ton can still be 'economical'; the important thing is that however many strokes or however big a paint load on each, each stroke serves a necessary function in the final work.

So we get to this specific painting, Crespi's version of 'Cupid and Psyche'. This painting is, at core, a lesson in power through simplicity because of the economies it uses. There are many, many other depictions of the Cupid and Psyche story, but plenty are not simple, and of the simple ones most are insipid (kindly put). Extremely few seem to be 'saying' anything, caught up more in the opportunity to show a pretty man and a pretty woman (pretty winged children, sometimes?) in a pretty setting. Crespi's take, on the other hand, takes a sprawling story and condenses it down into a single, pivotal moment, and uses such spare imagery to do it that the painting becomes almost harsh to look at.

That starkness is the first thing we can really grab hold of visually. To pick it apart, first we have the high contrast lighting (almost like a spotlight, an effect called tenebrism which had by Crespi's time been used for decades to e.g. heighten drama and add mystery). We have the colors, painted in with such a limited palette that even the areas that aren't dark appear almost monochromatic. We have the pattern of paint, thin in the darks and scratching up to thick full-bodied strokes nearest the light3. (The roughness with which the paint was applied is an aspect that stands out in person – this is not paint that has been delicately fussed over.) And then there's what's actually in the painting, which is very little — a man, a woman, a bed with bedhanging, a candle.

When we get to the figures, the starkness tips into a sense of intimacy and vulnerability...but with something off about it. We get, in fact, a sense of surprise and contradiction as we actually examine the figures: for one thing, despite being a man and woman in bed together (and both in a state of undress, usually conclusions can be drawn), the man appears to be alarmed or upset at the woman's presence. And for another, *he's* the one acting vulnerable, but he clearly has a bow and arrows under his left side while she just has a gently-held candle. As far as surprise goes, of course, there's also the part where this man has wings.

To this point I've been talking about the painting as if we don't know the backstory. Good narrative art can create a strong impression on its own, and indeed I believe this one does — but it may also be deepened by knowing the corresponding text/oral story. So knowing the Cupid and Psyche myth, we now get the following:
  1. We're clearly at the moment of discovery on both sides. Visual choices to enhance the drama of the moment include giving that tiny lamp an outsized effect (impossibly making that tiny flame the light source of the entire picture), and freezing the two-figures mid-movement, suspended somewhat awkwardly. This makes the lamp take on a potentially symbolic role (e.g. one small choice on Psyche's part takes on huge ramifications), and the mid-movement freeze-frame keeps us locked in an almost painful slice of time for these figures, a split-second that implies impending continued movement...and the consequences we know are in store4.
  2. Also deliberately cultivated by the artist: that confusing sense of vulnerability from the figure we can now identify as Cupid. Most notable choice would be that the knife Psyche has in some versions of the story has been deliberately excluded here, making Cupid's recoil from her demand a more psychological explanation. (Psyche has also been posed in a way that is absolutely non-threatening, in fact vulnerable in itself — again, underscoring that sense of psychological-but-not-physical threat to Cupid.)
  3. The painting has been kept overtly mythological, but with a twist. Crespi was known for domestic scenes, and *could* have given less emphasis to touches like Cupid's wings and his bow/quiver (notice that he *did* leave out any sense of a magical golden palace). Leaving these markers in the picture in a conspicuous way gives us a standard illustration-style mythological painting, but Crespi's tendencies as an artist still give us that intimacy, those realistic movements (compared to something like this), and a solid domestic grounding. The combined result captures our attention more: the domestic realism makes the myth seem more human, and the myth gives symbolic richness to the picture as a domestic scene.
Given the above, we can also take a stab at what this picture could be 'about': using the Cupid and Psyche story as a framework, this image works very well as a comment on the complicated, contradictory nature of love. We have vulnerability where least expected. Intimacy, but with fear. A couple caught in a moment of betrayal that is also discovery – and, as we can know from the frame story, experiencing this moment will actually prove necessary for bringing them together in a union truly full of *trusting* love.

So in sum:
  1. Economy of story, check. Crespi has placed us right in the complicated, meaningful moment of discovery, a big punch of narrative in a tiny slice of time.
  2. Economy of design, check. Two figures on a bed, with a single strong light source to create a stark value pattern and a dramatic, unified composition. Limited color use supports that impression.
  3. Economy of paint, check. Generally thin paint in the dark, building up to the thicknesses we see in the light; paint usage is consistently tied to depiction of light in this way, and nothing else is needed (see footnote 3 again).
All together, an odd duck of a painting, but powerfully to the point — and a wonderful example for narrative artists to chew over.


FOOTNOTES:

1. Original story from Apuleius' “The Golden Ass”, aka “Metamorphoses”. This story is believed to have existed in oral tradition for some time prior (which versions existed at this point is unclear), and has long been recognized as part of the likely inspiration for many fairy tales, such as “Beauty and the Beast” (“La Belle e La Bete” by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, 1740).

2. A note on formatting: terms bolded are genuine artistic vocabulary, commonly used in the world of art and art history. 'Single quotation marks', when used for highlighting a term and not just making a joke, are for words and phrases that I often use and find helpful but which have no common meaning. Italics are my favorite and I just allow them to run willy-nilly.

3. A lot of using oil paint in this way, working dark-to-light with increasingly thick paint, is a simple matter of practicality. Doing this ensures that your lightest colors are kept bright and unmuddied, and allows some of the underpainting to show through the dark areas, keeping them more rich. However, I still think it's worth mentioning as a deliberate effect, as part of the reason it's so widely adopted as 'practical' is that it does consistently produce this exact lighting effect. It could probably best be said that this is simply a default choice: that is, still a choice, but one without too much thought behind it.

4. In my dinking around with fiction writing, I've come across a concept for writing character arcs that I believe also works splendidly for narrative painting. This would be the 'Magical Midpoint Moment' in the 'Golden Triangle' of an arc: basically, the moment in which the story clarifies what it's really 'about' and presents a turning point for the protagonist, shifting them from their 'Pre-Story Psychology' into the 'Transformation' that they will have achieved by the end of the story. (For more on this, see James Scott Bell's book “Write Your Novel from the Middle”.) I mention it here because I do think that Crespi found a 'Magical Midpoint Moment' for *both* Cupid and Psyche in this painting, part of what makes the work so intriguing to think about in terms of what it's saying with its subjects.


ADDITIONAL FUN THINGS:
  • C.S. Lewis wrote a spiritual adaptation of the Cupid and Psyche story from the perspective of one of Psyche's sisters, called "Till We Have Faces". While a secular individual myself, I love C.S. Lewis' writing, and as a layered adult fairy tale this book is hard to beat.
  • There is apparently going to be a museum devoted solely to narrative art coming to Los Angeles, founded by George Lucas (and with John Lasseter of Pixar on the board) and fittingly named the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Their 'About' section is already worth a look to get a better idea of what 'narrative art' can mean, and I have nothing else to say about this except that I am stupid excited about it.

PAINTING SILLY BITS — Where we cheer to the stuff that makes no sense:
  • Psyche's shrunken leg. Keep looking, keep getting confused by that woman's bottom half compared to the rest of her body.
  • Darkness eats everyone's faces. By the time the artist painted this there was a long history of using the spotlight-in-the-dark effect seen here, and as discussed above it absolutely does add to the work in this case. That said, it's a tricky thing working with oil paint. It's subtle enough that you can work up to almost-complete-blackness while maintaining legibility...but if the varnish darkens just a little bit, all of a sudden you've got a dismembered hand and bird wing floating over a pair of legs.
Why did the blind man fall into the well? Because he couldn't see that well. Ba-dum tiss.
That said, of what you can see here, it is more color-accurate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • Object attachment disorder. Some objects make sense to tuck under the pillow or keep near yourself while sleeping, but can't say I've ever thought of 'bow and arrow' as one of them. Yes, the bow helps identify Cupid, but the god-man does also have wings...and given the earthy-realism feel the painting has going overall, it becomes difficult not to think about the practical side of Cupid bringing this stuff to bed. (Isn't he worried about snapping the bow if he rolls over on it? Does he put the whole kit down for sex and pick it back up to sleep? Isn't the arrow fletching also pretty bristly? Isn't the whole castle an invisible dream-structure in the middle of a magically secluded forest with no one for miles, providing no possible excuse to use the things? Questions.)

COMPARE/CONTRAST PIECES:


(And P.S. — Am not intending to make most standard blog posts this long :)