Sculpture by Antonio Canova
This my favourite sculpture in the entire world. I remember the first time I laid eyes on it at the Louvre, it captured my heart in an instant. It wasn’t until today that I actually found the story of Eros (lust) and Psyche (soul).
Naturally, the tale comes from the Ancient Greeks originally (not that it didn’t stop the Romans stealing it, renaming Eros: Cupid). The version below is taken directly from Wikipedia (link at the bottom, woohoo for (bad) referencing!) :
The earliest recorded version of the story is the one told by Apuleius, which goes like this.
Psyche is a princess who is so beautiful that people begin to treat her like a goddess, making symbolic gestures and even sacrifices to her. The goddess Venus is jealous of this and decides as her revenge she will ask her son Cupid to make Psyche fall in love with some ugly mortal. Cupid reluctantly agrees, and flies to Psyche’s bedside. But as he is about to shoot one of his fateful arrows, Psyche wakes up, startles him, and he scratches his own leg. He falls in love with her.
Meanwhile, Psyche’s parents are concerned that Psyche has no suitors. She is so beautiful that no one dares to propose to her. They go to an oracle of Apollo, which instructs them to prepare her for marriage as one would be prepared for human sacrifice. The parents tearfully carry out this instruction, escorting her in procession to the top of a cliff. Psyche accepts her fate boldly, saying she is eager to meet her beautiful new husband.
The parents and their entourage leave Psyche to her fate. Psyche is then transported to a wood, where she finds a beautiful palace. She goes in, and begins to live there, served by invisible spirits. She even has an invisible lover. But he tells her she is not allowed to look at him directly, and he visits her only at night. She doesn’t even know who he is.
But Psyche can hear the voices of her sisters calling to her from the mortal realm. She goes back to visit them. They hear her stories about her new life, and jealously they urge to look at her husband, raising doubts in her mind that he might be a monster. So that night she looks at him, using a lamp. She sees that he is a god. But she frightens him, and he jostles the lamp, spilling hot oil on himself, which injures him. He leaves her and goes back to the realm of the gods.
Psyche returns home and is miserable. She then goes to temples and makes sacrifices to all the gods to find out which one it was that had been her lover. The only god who will answer her is Venus. The god turns out to be none other than her son Cupid (i.e. Desire or Eros; Venus means sexual desire, and Psyche’s name in turn means “soul”). Psyche begs Venus to help her find Cupid, and Venus then imposes a series of labors on Psyche – including a descent into Hades. Psyche is able to achieve these labors with help from divine assistants, including, for the last labor, Cupid himself.
Her successful completion of the labors means that Psyche is at last able to marry Cupid officially – she becomes immortal and they are united in eternity.
Then Psyche and Cupid have a baby, Voluptas (Pleasure) – who was, however, conceived before their official wedding.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupid_and_Psyche
I have been inspired. 🙂
This is the second time I’ve had to write about this sculpture in my IB course, the first time being in TOK when we had to bring in a picture of one of our favourite pieces of art. The second time being now as I do my World Lit essay, one of the perfumes mentioned is called ‘Amor and Psyche’, which led me to look up any possible points of significance I could include in my analysis.
When I finally read the story I just knew I had to share it with you all!
(For the record: I don’t really think it does… unless… hang on… you’re currently reading my brain turning cogs right now… oh my god there is significance! HOLY CRAP! BRAIN BLAST! I GET IT! OMG! :O)
Okay, I might as well un-bracket this. HERE IS MY THEORY AS TO WHY “AMOR AND PSYCHE” IS SIGNIFICANT…………………..
Ok, so ‘Amor and Psyche’ translates to ‘Love/Lust and Soul’, after Grenouille replicates the perfume perfectly for Baldini in chapter 15 in order to convince him to take him on as an apprentice, Grenouille then offers to “make it better” (pg 88). This process of ‘making it better’, that being the scent of “Love and Soul” begins with Baldini when he teaches Grenouille, the tick, how to distill essences. From there Grenouille moves from perfumer to perfumer as he follows the course of Suskind’s bildungsroman novel, eventually making his masterpiece.
How? How does he make the scent of “love and soul” better? Well, by killing and distilling the ‘essences’ of 25 maidens. Not just any maidens at that, but 25 maidens that are some of “those rare humans who inspire love” (pg 195).
Grenouille’s masterpiece is the literal distillation of “love and soul”.
I’m a freaking genius.
*Smug Smirk*
Really hope this helps anyone out there who is doing “Perfume” for their Text in Translation essay! Good luck IB-ers!
My Copy of “Perfume” for Page References!
One Girl and a Dream 