Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss

Antonio Canova caught the instant just before a kiss: Cupid, wings still spread as if he had only now alighted, cradles the head of Psyche, who rises from a deathlike sleep and lifts her arms to circle his face. The two bodies form a pair of crossing diagonals, and the marble is worked to very different finishes, glassy smooth for skin, softly folded for the sheet across Psyche's hips, rough for the rock beneath, finely feathered for the wings. It is one of the most celebrated works of Neoclassical sculpture, though the charged emotion of the moment already points towards Romanticism.

The subject comes from The Golden Ass, the Latin novel by Apuleius. Sent to the underworld to fetch a portion of beauty from Proserpina for Venus, Psyche was forbidden to open the jar she carried; on her way back curiosity won, and instead of beauty the jar released a sleep like death. Cupid found her, gathered the sleep back into the jar and woke her. Canova shows exactly that awakening. A British patron, Colonel John Campbell, ordered the group in 1787, and the sculptor worked on it until 1793, but it was never delivered to him. It passed instead through the hands of a collector while still in the studio, then to Joachim Murat, who displayed it at his château in Neuilly from 1801. In 1808 Murat ceded it to Napoleon, and it reached the Louvre in 1809; after some years at the palace of Compiègne it returned to the museum for good in 1822. Canova made a second version for the Russian Prince Yusupov, now in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.

The group, about 1.55 metres high and 1.68 metres wide, was conceived to be seen from every side. A handle near Psyche's foot allowed it to be turned on its base, and the German critic Carl Ludwig Fernow complained that it offered no single correct view, forcing the viewer to walk round it again and again, which is precisely what visitors still do. Canova, born in 1757 in Possagno in the Veneto, became the most sought-after sculptor in Europe, courted by Napoleon and invited, in vain, to the court of Catherine the Great.

In the Louvre the work stands in the Denon wing, on the ground floor, in the Michelangelo Gallery, among Italian sculpture. Paris, the French capital on the Seine, has housed its national collections in the former royal palace of the Louvre since the late 18th century.

Getting there

The sculpture is in the Louvre Museum, in the 1st arrondissement of central Paris, on the right bank of the Seine. The nearest airport is Paris-Orly (ORY), about 15 km away; Paris-Charles de Gaulle (CDG) is the city's main international airport.