Love – Jennifer McDonell
The act of looking is paramount to these three works, which catch love and seduction in the act. They gesture towards other stories and emotional possibilities intimated but not fully revealed. The psychodynamics of amatory discourse is encoded through recursions to a traditional Western iconography associated with the mythological lovers, Cupid and Psyche. In Giovanni Battista de’ Cavalieri’s engraving, a slightly stooped, supplicating Psyche gazes apprehensively upwards. Who is she looking at? Is her uncertainty a reaction to the arrival of Cupid, or to the wind Zephyr about to spirit her away, or to Venus tormenting her with ever more impossible tasks? Anchored in the eighteenth-century aesthetic of sensibility Charles Parson Knight’s ambiguously titled engraving, Run Away Love, depicts an isolated young woman in a copse, searching for love, while a chubby infant Cupid hides in the bushes behind to left, holding a bow and pointing back over his shoulder. Who is the woman meeting? Will she be wounded by Cupid’s arrow and fall hopelessly in love with the first person she sees? Secrecy is at also the centre of E. B. Minns’ misty watercolour depicting a pretty Cupid whispering stories of love into the ear of a pensive woman, her gaze demurely directed downwards, the soft curl of her lip betraying, perhaps, a hint of guilty pleasure. Or is the mythological figure a hybrid of Cupid and Psyche, as suggested by the decorative butterfly wings that usually attach to Psyche, symbolising the soul freed from the shackles of the chrysalis? In artistically distinct, historically situated ways each work foregrounds women captured in the act of responding to important, potentially hazardous moments that may determine the outcome of their lives.
The extensive reception of the Cupid and Psyche story in the classical Western tradition has made it a popular subject for painters, printmakers, sculptors and designers. Originally from Metamorphoses, also called The Golden Ass, the story by Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (or Platonicus), was written in the 2nd century AD, although features of the myth predate Apuleius and can be found in fairy tales and folklore across multiple traditions. Apuleius narrates Cupid’s visits to Psyche at night in the darkness of her room, and when she betrays his trust and lights an oil lamp to see who he is, the god is burned and flees. Psyche must wander and complete nearly impossible tasks for Venus before she is permitted to reunite with him. Granted immortality, Psyche is eventually united in marriage with Cupid and gives birth to a child called ‘Pleasure’ (or Voluptas). It is commonplace to interpret Apulieus’s tale as an allegory about the complete union of spiritual and physical love, an interpretation supported by the etymologies of the words ‘Psyche’ and ‘Cupid’, the former from the Latin for ‘soul’ or ‘breath of life’, and the latter from the Latin verb ‘cupere’ meaning love, desire or lust. But in the odd combination of a baby’s body with lethal weapons, along with parents associated with both love and war, Cupid is a figure of contradictions – a symbol of conflict and desire.
While the traditional iconography of Cupid and Psyche references conflicts inherent in Greek, Christian and Romantic discourses on love and desire, the story has often been received as a consoling exemplum of the importance of correct marriages and marriage rituals for societal cohesion. For one thing, Psyche’s marriage to Cupid redeems him from a history of provoking adultery and sordid liaisons. Run Away Love and Tales of Love, however, rework the trope of forbidden desire and pleasure that inheres in the originary myth. The Cavalieri and Knight works also have their origins in preexisting images which the printmakers copy and interpret, thereby complicating the post-romantic concept of artistic originality. Cavilieri replicates a sculpture that was housed in the Villa Farnesina in Rome, a well-known site of reproduction and print culture in Renaissance Italy. Similarly, Knight’s engraving refers to a prior work of the same name by English painter, illustrator and designer, Thomas Stothard (1755 -1834), which was part of a print series that reinstated ‘returned love’ and marriage. The delicate purple wash of Minns’ painting references the ‘feminine’ through a colour that was associated with women’s independence (noting that Minns produced pro-suffrage illustrations for the popular press). In attenuated and coded ways the works on display repurpose the moral inherent in allegory to invite viewers to speculate on female restlessness, discontent and impossible fantasy. In doing so, they place subjectivity and multiplicity of interpretation at the centre of the relationship between the image and the viewer.
Jennifer McDonell is a Professor in English at UNE. Her primary research concentration is Victorian literature and cultural history. Recent published work in the area of ethics, animals and literary representation includes essays on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, women and pet-keeping in Victorian England; mourning for pets and sentimentality; literary human and animal studies and the academy, and animals in the work of Charles Dickens. She has also published on the poetry of Robert Browning, and on Browning, Henry James and literary fame.
Image credits:
B.E. Minns, The Tale of Love (detail), 1923, watercolour. Gift of Howard Hinton 1938. Howard Hinton Collection.
Giovanni Battista de’ Cavalieri, In aedibus Farnesianis (Psyche) (detail),Plate 46, Antiquarum statuarum urbis Romae, 1569-1594, copperplate engraving on hand-laid paper. MA2017.1.2. UNE Museum of Antiquities.
