Today we bring you another installment in our Myths Remastered series. We began the series several weeks ago with a retelling of the story of Apollo and Daphne. Today we take on Cupid and Psyche, the famous lovers featured in a loggia designed by Raphael in the Villa Farnesina.
Cupid, god of love, was an arrow-toting teenage divinity, but he was not immune to the powers of the heart. His first and only love was a mortal woman named Psyche, whose beauty and charm the young Cupid found irresistible. The true but tumultuous love story of Cupid and Psyche is immortalized on the walls and ceiling of Rome’s Villa Farnesina (see above), a Renaissance pleasure palace built by Agostino Chigi.
Chigi, a banker and power broker, was celebrated as the richest man in Rome for some twenty years in the early 1500s. Already in possession of a proper palazzo in the center of the city, he wanted (and no doubt needed) a suburban villa—a place where he could get away from the constant pressures induced by the task of keeping track of Papal bank accounts. Thus, Chigi built himself a luxurious weekend getaway in a Roman subdivision being developed by his client and friend, Pope Julius II. While Chigi might have claimed that his villa was a place for deep thoughts and business deals (thereby making it a Renaissance tax write-off), everyone in town called his suburban villa the “love shack,” for like all Renaissance moguls, Agostino made a practice of engaging the most elegant and expensive courtesans, and his Villa provided precisely the venue in which he could partake of that leisurely pastime.
When he broke ground for his villa in 1508, Agostino intended to inhabit it alongside his mistress, a very famous Renaissance courtesan named Imperia. Mocking the relationship, a contemporary poet penned a droll verse about Agostino (here likened to Rome’s first emperor, Augustus) and his lover
Your Imperia, Augustus
She is no empire,
But she with her name changed is called Emporium.
Unfortunately, Chigi and Imperia parted ways before the Villa was complete. However, not one to remain single for long, Agostino made a trip to Venice where a beautiful young girl named Francesca captured his heart. She moved into the “love shack” in 1511 and over the course of the next years, she and Agostino had four children together before finally taking vows at the insistence of Pope Leo X in 1519.
Agostino and Francesca’s new home must have been featured on the cover of every sixteenth-century interior design magazine, for its décor provided a dazzling display of all the best that money could buy. Baldessare Peruzzi, an architect from Chigi’s hometown, Siena, was chosen to design the villa, and he employed a classical style meant to honor and to evoke the glory of ancient Rome. Inside the villa, Raphael, Sodoma, Peruzzi, and Sebastiano del Piombo were commissioned to fresco the walls and ceilings with the love affairs of the ancient Roman gods and goddesses. Certainly Agostino meant for these love stories to inspire the passions of his mistress and to titillate his constant stream of guests – many of them high-ranking church officials.
Chigi asked Raphael to decorate the vaulted ceiling and the walls of his entry loggia with a cycle of frescoes. Overcommitted in both his work and his personal life, Raphael didn’t have time to do much of the painting, but he did manage to produce sketches that were used by his apprentices to decorate the impressive entryway. The result is a glorious cycle of frescoes that depict the romance of Cupid and Psyche – an ancient love story made popular by Renaissance humanists and one meant to assure us that true love will triumph over any adversity.
Psyche was a mortal girl - the youngest daughter of a king and queen. She was so beautiful that the citizens of her town came to believe that she was Venus reborn and therefore offered her the same kinds of adulation that they generally reserved for the Goddess of Love. High and mighty Venus – always jealous when the spotlight shone on another pretty girl – was vexed when her devoted worshipers focused their attention elsewhere and so she sent her son Cupid to punish Psyche in the worst of all possible ways.
Cupid’s assignment was to make the mortal girl fall in love with someone just her opposite - a base and ugly man who would make her life miserable. But, in sending Cupid to do her dirty work, Venus did not take into account the effect that Psyche’s beauty might have on her teenage love child, and when Cupid laid eyes on Psyche, he was so overcome with passion that he forgot his mission. In the utmost of secrecy, he whisked the girl off to his palace in the sky, Once in Cupid’s abode, Psyche was waited on hand and foot by the gentle breezes, and each night Cupid visited her, though he kept his identity concealed. The god promised to be faithful to the smitten Psyche forever if she did not try to find out his identity. Trust was paramount to the maintenance of this relationship.
Psyche agreed to Cupid’s condition of anonymity, but the promise she made to him was hard to keep, and its difficulty only increased when Psyche’s sisters came to visit her in Cupid’s palace. Always jealous of her beauty, the two sisters now became resentful of Psyche’s heavenly home. “Who is he?” they asked. “What does he look like?” Psyche had no answers. Each time the sisters visited, they became increasingly envious. On their third visit, Psyche had some exciting news. “I’m going to have a baby,” she told them joyfully. But the happy moment was ruined when the sisters began to press Psyche even further about the identity of her lover. They suggested to her that he might be a terrible monster that would devour her when the baby was born. Terrified, Psyche agreed that it would be wise to discover his identity, and with her sisters she concocted a plan.
For the trusting Cupid, that fateful night was just like any other. After a long day of shooting love’s arrows, the young god headed home, anticipating a cozy evening with his beloved. Following a candlelit dinner served by the winds themselves, Cupid and Psyche fell into bed and made love. Then, as usual, Cupid drifted off to sleep. Psyche, on the other hand, stayed alert, and when Cupid was lightly snoring she quietly lit an oil lamp and held it above him. What she saw was not at all what her sisters had suggested. Her lover was no monster! He was so radiant and godlike in his beauty that Psyche was overcome by his immortal splendor. Her hand began to tremble and a drop of hot oil spilled out of the lamp and onto Cupid’s shoulder.
Rudely awakened, Cupid sprang from bed, enraged that Psyche had broken her vow. He banished his lover from the castle and fled to his mother’s side in search of comfort. Outraged to hear of her son’s secret relationship, Venus went in pursuit of Psyche, thrilled to have a legitimate reason to squelch her archrival. However, unable to capture the merely mortal girl, Venus implored Jupiter to send out a search party, and when Psyche was finally found, she was brought to stand in judgment before the Goddess of Love, who sought her revenge by sentencing the girl to a series of impossible tasks.
First, Venus made Psyche sort an enormous pyramid of mixed grains. The task looked hopeless, but an industrious team of ants came to her aid. Next she sent the girl to gather golden wool from a dangerous flock of man-eating sheep. Against all odds, the girl succeeded in this task as well. Then Venus commanded Psyche to fill a vessel at a stream protected by a dragon. At just the right moment, Jupiter’s eagle dropped from the sky and swiftly filled the container for her.
Bemused at Psyche’s successful completion of these tasks (and even angrier than before), Venus assigned Psyche a chore that she knew would destroy her. The girl was commissioned to go to the Underworld where she was to fill a vessel with Queen Persephone’s beauty and bring it back to Venus. Knowing the impossibility of this task – no one was able to return to the living once they entered the Underworld - Psyche threw herself from a tower in despair. But, as she fell, the tower spoke, giving her instructions as to how the task might be completed, and the winds came to her rescue and safely guided her to the ground.
Cupid, in the meantime, was recovering from his burn. When he became aware of the torture his mother was inflicting on Psyche, the boy-god intervened by going directly to Venus’s superior. He asked Jupiter, the King of the Gods, for permission to marry Psyche (even though doing so was risky business as he had repeatedly wounded Jupiter with lust-inducing arrows that sent the King of the Gods careening from one ignoble dignified romantic encounter to another). At an assembly of the gods, the arrow-toting boy-god’s request was granted. A splendid wedding feast appeared in the heavens and all the gods came to celebrate the union of Cupid (Erotic Love) with Psyche (the Mind). Shortly thereafter, their child, Voluptas (Pleasure), was born.
Such is the story portrayed in Agostino Chigi’s Loggia of Cupid and Psyche. And though Raphael complied with the wishes of Agostino Chigi in that he designed the Cupid and Psyche paintings in the loggia, he was just too busy to do much of the actual painting. The only figure that can definitively be said to be by Raphael is one of the Three Graces, who sits delicately on a cloud, her bare back and bottom facing the viewer, as she twists to look over her shoulder (see the second photo in this entry). The rest of the scenes on the walls and the ceiling – including the faux tapestries that billow below a blue sky and appear to be woven with images of Cupid asking Jupiter for the hand of Psyche as well as the wedding of the lovers – were almost certainly painted by Raphael’s apprentices.
Click here to read our interview with best-selling author Dave King, whose new novel, a work-in-progress, is inspired (in part) by the Villa Farnesina and by Cupid and Psyche.
