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In classical mythology, Cupid ( , meaning "passionate desire") is the god of desire, lust, attraction and affection. He is often portrayed as the son of the love goddess Venus and the god of war Mars. He is also known as Amor (Latin: Amor, "love"). His Greek counterpart is Eros. Larousse Desk Reference Encyclopedia, The Book People, Haydock, 1995, p. 215. Although Eros is generally portrayed as a slender winged youth in Classical Greece Greek art, during the Hellenistic period, he was increasingly portrayed as a chubby boy. During this time, his iconography acquired the bow and arrow that represent his source of power: a person, or even a deity, who is shot by Cupid's arrow is filled with uncontrollable desire. In myths, Cupid is a minor character who serves mostly to set the plot in motion. He is a main character only in the tale of Cupid and Psyche, when wounded by his own weapons, he experiences the ordeal of love. Although other extended stories are not told about him, his tradition is rich in poetic themes and visual scenarios, such as "Love conquers all" and the retaliatory punishment or torture of Cupid.
In art, Cupid often appears in multiples as the Amores (in the later terminology of art history, Italian amorini), the equivalent of the Greek Erotes. Cupids are a frequent motif of both Roman art and later Western art of the classical tradition. In the 15th century, the iconography of Cupid starts to become indistinguishable from the putto.
Cupid continued to be a popular figure in the Middle Ages, when under Christian influence he often had a dual nature as Heavenly and Earthly love. In the Renaissance, a renewed interest in classical philosophy endowed him with complex allegory meanings. In contemporary popular culture, Cupid is shown drawing his bow to inspire romantic love, often as an icon of Valentine's Day.This introduction is based on the entry on "Cupid" in The Classical Tradition, edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis (Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 244–246. Cupid's powers are similar, though not identical, to Kamadeva, the Hindu god of human love.
At the same time, the Eros who was pictured as a boy or slim youth was regarded as the child of a divine couple, the identity of whom varied by source. The influential Renaissance mythographer Natale Conti began his chapter on Cupid/Eros by declaring that the Greeks themselves were unsure about his parentage: Heaven and Earth,Sappho, fragment 31. Ares and Aphrodite,Simonides, fragment 54. Nyx and Ether,Acusilaus, FGrH 1A 3 frg. 6C. or the Rainbow and Zephyros.Alcaeus, fragment 13. Citations of ancient sources from Conti given by John Mulryan and Steven Brown, Natale Conti's Mythologiae Books I–V (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), vol. 1, p. 332. The Greek travel writer Pausanias, he notes, contradicts himself by saying at one point that Eros welcomed Aphrodite into the world, and at another that Eros was the son of Aphrodite and the youngest of the gods.Natale Conti, Mythologiae 4.14.
In Latin literature, Cupid is usually treated as the son of Venus without reference to a father. Seneca says that Volcanus, as the husband of Venus, is the father of Cupid.Seneca, Octavia 560. Cicero, however, says that there were three Cupids, as well as three Venuses: the first Cupid was the son of Mercury and Diana, the second of Mercury and the second Venus, and the third of Mars and the third Venus. This last Cupid was the equivalent of Anteros, "Counter-Love", one of the Erotes, the gods who embody aspects of love.Cicero, De Natura Deorum 3.59–60. The multiple Cupids frolicking in art are the decorative manifestation of these proliferating loves and desires. During the English Renaissance, Christopher Marlowe wrote of "ten thousand Cupids"; in Ben Jonson's wedding masque Hymenaei, "a thousand several-coloured loves ... hop about the nuptial room".M.T. Jones-Davies and Ton Hoenselaars, introduction to Masque of Cupids, edited and annotated by John Jowett, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 1031.
In the later classical tradition, Cupid is most often regarded as the son of Venus and Mars, whose love affair represented an allegory of Love and War."Cupid," The Classical Tradition, p. 244. The duality between the primordial and the sexually conceived Eros accommodated philosophical concepts of Heavenly and Earthly Love even in the Christian era.Entry on "Cupid," The Classical Tradition, p. 244.
In Botticelli's Allegory of Spring (1482), also known by its Italian title La Primavera, Cupid is shown blindfolded while shooting his arrow, positioned above the central figure of Venus.Jennifer Speake and Thomas G. Bergin, entry on "Cupid," Encyclopedia of the Renaissance and the Reformation (Market House Books, rev. ed. 2004), p. 129.
Particularly in ancient Roman art, cupids may also carry or be surrounded by fruits, animals, or attributes of the Horae or the wine-god Dionysus, symbolizing the earth's generative capacity.Jean Sorabella, "A Roman Sarcophagus and Its Patron," Metropolitan Museum Journal 36 (2001), p. 75.
Having all these associations, Cupid is considered to share parallels with the Hindu god Kamadeva. Entry: "Kama"
A variation is found in The Kingis Quair, a 15th-century poem attributed to James I of Scotland, in which Cupid has three arrows: gold, for a gentle "smiting" that is easily cured; the more compelling silver; and steel, for a love-wound that never heals. The Kingis Quair, lines 92–99; Walter W. Skeat, Chaucerian and Other Pieces (Oxford University Press, 1897, 1935), sup. vol., note 1315, p. 551.
The story was first told about Eros in the Idyll XIX of Theocritus (3rd century BC).Theocritus, Idyll 19. It also appears in Anacreontea. It was retold numerous times in both art and poetry during the Renaissance. The theme brought the Amoretti poetry cycle (1595) of Edmund Spenser to a conclusion,Jane Kingsley-Smith, Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 12. and furnished subject matter for at least twenty works by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his workshop.Charles Sterling et al., Fifteenth- to Eighteenth-Century European Paintings in the Robert Lehman Collection: France, Central Europe, The Netherlands, Spain, and Great Britain (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), pp. 43–44. The German poet and classicist Karl Philipp Conz (1762–1827) framed the tale as Schadenfreude ("taking pleasure in someone else's pain") in a poem by the same title.Youens, Hugo Wolf and His Mörike Songs, p. 119. In a version by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a writer of the German Enlightenment, the incident prompts Cupid to turn himself into a bee:
Through this sting was Amor made wiser.
The untiring deceiver
concocted another battle-plan:
he lurked beneath the carnations and roses
and when a maiden came to pick them,
he flew out as a bee and stung her.Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Die Biene; Youens, Hugo Wolf and His Mörike Songs, p. 119.
The image of Cupid as a bee is part of a complex tradition of poetic imagery involving the flower of youth, the sting of love as a deflowering, and honey as a secretion of love.Youens, Hugo Wolf and His Mörike Songs, pp. 117–120.
In other contexts, Cupid with a dolphin recurs as a playful motif, as in garden statuary at Pompeii that shows a dolphin rescuing Cupid from an octopus, or Cupid holding a dolphin. The dolphin, often elaborated fantastically, might be constructed as a spout for a fountain.Anthony King, "Mammals: Evidence from Wall Paintings, Sculpture, Mosaics, Faunal Remains, and Ancient Literary Sources," in The Natural History of Pompeii (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 419–420. On a modern-era fountain in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy, Cupid seems to be strangling a dolphin."Archaeological News," American Journal of Archaeology 11.2 (1896), p. 304.
Dolphins were often portrayed in antiquity as friendly to humans, and the dolphin itself could represent affection. Pliny records a tale of a dolphin at Puteoli carrying a boy on its back across a lake to go to school each day; when the boy died, the dolphin grieved itself to death.Pliny, Natural History 9.8.24; Alcock, " Pisces in Britannia," p. 25.
In erotic scenes from mythology, Cupid riding the dolphin may convey how swiftly love moves,Marietta Cambareri and Peter Fusco, catalogue description for a Venus and Cupid, Italian and Spanish Sculpture: Catalogue of the J. Paul Getty Museum Collection (Getty Publications, 2002), p. 62. or the Cupid astride a sea beast may be a reassuring presence for the wild ride of love.Thomas Puttfarken, Titian and Tragic Painting: Aristotle's Poetics And the Rise of the Modern Artist (Yale University Press, 2005), p. 174. A dolphin-riding Cupid may attend scenes depicting the wedding of Neptune and Amphitrite or the Triumph of Neptune, also known as a marine thiasos.
Michelangelo's work was important in establishing the reputation of the young artist, who was only twenty at the time. At the request of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, his patron, he increased its value by deliberately making it look "antique",Deborah Parker, Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 11. thus creating "his most notorious fake".Goffen, Renaissance Rivals, p. 95. After the deception was acknowledged, the Cupid Sleeping was displayed as evidence of his virtuosity alongside an ancient marble, attributed to Praxiteles, of Cupid asleep on a lion skin.Estelle Lingo, François Duquesnoy and the Greek Ideal (Yale University Press, 2007), p. 61.
In the poetry of Giambattista Marino (d. 1625), the image of Cupid or Amore sleeping represents the indolence of Love in the lap of Idleness. A madrigal by his literary rival Gaspare Murtola exhorted artists to paint the theme. A catalogue of works from antiquity collected by the Mattei family, patrons of Caravaggio, included sketches of sleeping cupids based on sculpture from the Temple of Venus Erycina in Rome. Caravaggio, whose works Murtola is known for describing, took up the challenge with his 1608 Sleeping Cupid, a disturbing depiction of an unhealthy, immobilized child with "jaundiced skin, flushed cheeks, bluish lips and ears, the emaciated chest and swollen belly, the wasted muscles and inflamed joints". The model is thought to have suffered from juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.John L. Varriano, Caravaggio (Penn State Press, 2006), pp. 57, 130. Caravaggio's sleeping Cupid was reconceived in fresco by Giovanni da San Giovanni, and the subject recurred throughout Roman and Italian work of the period.Macioe, "Caravaggio and the Role of Classical Models," p. 436–438.
Omnia vincit Amor: et nos cedamus Amori.
Love conquers all, and so let us surrender ourselves to Love.Vergil, Eclogues 10.69.
The theme was also expressed as the Roman triumph of Cupid, as in the Triumphs of Petrarch.Aldo S. Bernardo, Petrarch, Laura, and the Triumphs (State University of New York, 1974), p. 102ff.; Varriano, Caravaggio, p. 123.
Cupid became more common in Roman art from the time of Augustus, the first Roman emperor. After the Battle of Actium, when Mark Antony and Cleopatra were defeated, Cupid transferring the weapons of Mars to his mother Venus became a motif of Augustan imagery.Charles Brian Rose, "The Parthians in Augustan Rome," American Journal of Archaeology 109.1 (2005), pp. 27–28 In the Aeneid, the national epic of Rome by the poet Virgil, Cupid disguises himself as Ascanius, the son of Aeneas who was in turn the son of Venus herself, and in this form he beguiles Queen Dido of Carthage to fall in love with the hero. She gives safe harbor to Aeneas and his band of refugees from Trojan War, only to be abandoned by him as he fulfills his destiny to found Rome. Iulus (also known as Ascanius) becomes the mythical founder of the Julian family from which Julius Caesar came. Augustus, Caesar's heir, commemorated a beloved great-grandson who died as a child by having him portrayed as Cupid, dedicating one such statue at the Temple of Venus on the Capitoline Hill, and keeping one in his bedroom where he kissed it at night.Suetonius, Caligula 7; Robert Turcan, The Gods of Ancient Rome (Routledge, 2001; originally published in French 1998), p. 18. A brother of this child became the emperor Claudius, whose mother Antonia Minor appears in a surviving portrait-sculpture as Venus, with Cupid on her shoulder.Susann S. Lusnia, "Urban Planning and Sculptural Display in Severan Rome: Reconstructing the Septizodium and Its Role in Dynastic Politics," American Journal of Archaeology 108.4 (2004), p. 530. The Augustus of Prima Porta is accompanied by a Cupid riding a dolphin.J. C. McKeow, A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 210. Cupids in multiples appeared on the of the Temple of Venus Genetrix (Venus as "Begetting Mother"), and influenced scenes of relief sculpture on other works such as sarcophagi, particularly those of children.Janet Huskinson, Roman Children's Sarcophagi: Their Decoration and Its Social Significance (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 41ff.
As a winged figure, Cupido shared some characteristics with the goddess Victoria.Clark, Divine Qualities, p. 199; Huskinson, Roman Children's Sarcophagi, passim. On coinage issued by Sulla the Roman dictator, Cupid bears the palm branch, the most common attribute of Victory.J. Rufus Fears, "The Theology of Victory at Rome: Approaches and Problem," Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.17.2 (1981), p. 791, and in the same volume, "The Cult of Virtues and Roman Imperial Ideology," p. 881. "Desire" in Roman cultureIn antiquity, and were not distinguished by capitalization, and there was no sharp line between an abstraction such as cupido and its divine personification Cupido; J. Rufus Fears, "The Cult of Virtues and Roman Imperial Ideology," Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.17.2 (1981), p. 849, note 69. was often attached to power as well as to erotic attraction. Roman historians criticize cupido gloriae, "desire for glory", and cupido imperium, "desire for ruling power".William V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome: 327-70 B.C. (Oxford University Press, 1979, 1985), pp. 17–18; Sviatoslav Dmitrie, The Greek Slogan of Freedom and Early Roman Politics in Greece (Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 372; Philip Hardie, Rumour and Renown: Representations of Fama in Western Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 33, 172, 234, 275, 333ff. In Latin philosophical discourse, cupido is the equivalent of Greek pothos, a focus of reflections on the meaning and burden of desire. In depicting the "pious love" (amor pius) of Nisus and Euryalus in the Aeneid, Vergil has Nisus wonder:
Is it the gods who put passion in men's mind, Euryalus, or does each person's fierce desire (cupido) become his own God?As quoted by David Armstrong, Vergil, Philodemus, and the Augustans (University of Texas Press, 2004), p. 181; Aeneid 9.184–184: dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt, / Euryale, an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?In Lucretius' physics of sex, cupido can represent human lust and an animal instinct to mate, but also the impulse of atoms to bond and form matter.Diskin Clay, " De Rerum Natura: Greek Physis and Epicurean Physiologia (Lucretius 1.1–148)," Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 100 (1969), p. 37. An association of sex and violence is found in the erotic fascination for , who often had sexualized names such as Cupido.H.S. Versnel, "A Parody on Hymns in Martial V.24 and Some Trinitarian Problems," Mnemosyne 27.4 (1974), p. 368.
Cupid was the enemy of chastity, and the poet Ovid opposes him to Diana, the virgin goddess of the hunt who likewise carries a bow but who hates Cupid's passion-provoking arrows. Tela Cupidinis odit: Ovid, Ars Amatoria 1.261; C.M.C. Green, "Terms of Venery: Ars Amatoria I," Transactions of the American Philological Association 126 (1996), pp. 242, 245. Cupid is also at odds with Apollo, the archer-brother of Diana and patron of poetic inspiration whose love affairs almost always end disastrously. Ovid jokingly blames Cupid for causing him to write love poetry instead of the more respectable epic.Rebecca Armstrong, "Retiring Apollo: Ovid on the Politics and Poetics of Self-Sufficiency," Classical Quarterly 54.2 (2004) 528–550.
The fame of Psyche's beauty threatens to eclipse that of Venus herself, and the love goddess sends Cupid to work her revenge. Cupid, however, becomes enamored of Psyche, and arranges for her to be taken to his palace. He visits her by night, warning her not to try to look upon him. Psyche's envious sisters convince her that her lover must be a hideous monster, and she finally introduces a lamp into their chamber to see him. Startled by his beauty, she drips hot oil from the lamp and wakes him. He abandons her. She wanders the earth looking for him, and finally submits to the service of Venus, who tortures her. The goddess then sends Psyche on a series of quests. Each time she despairs, and each time she is given divine aid. On her final task, she is to retrieve a dose of Proserpina's beauty from the underworld. She succeeds, but on the way back can not resist opening the box in the hope of benefitting from it herself, whereupon she falls into a torpid sleep. Cupid finds her in this state, and revives her by returning the sleep to the box. Cupid grants her immortality so the couple can be wed as equals.
The story's Neoplatonic elements and allusions to mystery religions accommodate multiple interpretations,Stephen Harrison, entry on "Cupid," The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 338. and it has been analyzed as an allegory and in light of folklore, Märchen or fairy tale, and myth.Hendrik Wagenvoort, "Cupid and Psyche," reprinted in Pietas: Selected Studies in Roman Religion (Brill, 1980), pp. 84–92. Often presented as an allegory of love overcoming death, the story was a frequent source of imagery for Roman sarcophagi and other extant art of antiquity. Since the rediscovery of Apuleius's novel in the Renaissance, the reception theory of Cupid and Psyche in the classical tradition has been extensive. The story has been retold in poetry, drama, and opera, and depicted widely in painting, sculpture, and various media.Harrison, "Cupid and Psyche," in Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome, p. 339. It has also played a role in popular culture as an example for "true love", and is commonly used in relation to the holiday Valentine's Day.
"La Belle et la Bête" ("The Beauty and the Beast") was written by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve, and then abridged by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1740; in 1991 it inspired the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast. It has been said that Gabrielle was inspired by the tale Cupid and Psyche.
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