Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss

What you are looking at

Psyche lies half-reclined on a rock, her body twisting upward, her arms raised to encircle the head of the winged god bending over her. Cupid has just landed: his wings are still spread high behind him, one hand cradles her head, the other supports her breast. Their faces are about to meet. The photograph on this page is a close detail of that moment.

Cupid's head, framed by tight curls, tilts down over Psyche's upturned face; his eyes are lowered, his lips almost touching hers. Her fingers spread across his hair and the back of his head, pulling him in. The light catches his cheek, nose and lips and leaves the space between the two faces in soft shadow.

That space is the subject. Canova shows the instant before the kiss, when Psyche is returning to life but has not yet opened her eyes.

The story

The tale comes from The Golden Ass (also called the Metamorphoses) by the second-century Roman writer Apuleius. Psyche, a mortal princess so beautiful that people neglected the worship of Venus, became the secret wife of Cupid, the goddess's son, on condition that she never look at him. When she broke the promise he fled, and Psyche had to perform a series of impossible tasks set by Venus. The last was to fetch a box of beauty from Proserpina in the underworld.

Opening it out of curiosity, Psyche fell into a deathlike sleep. Cupid found her, wiped the sleep from her face and woke her with a prick of his arrow; later writers and artists turned the awakening into a kiss. Psyche was eventually made immortal and united with Cupid.

Psyche's name means "soul" in Greek, and the story was long read as an allegory of the soul purified by trials and brought to divine love.

Commission and history

The group was commissioned in 1787 by the Scottish collector Colonel John Campbell, later Lord Cawdor, and carved in Canova's studio in Rome between 1787 and 1793. Campbell never took delivery. In 1800–1801 it was bought by Joachim Murat, Napoleon's brother-in-law and later King of Naples, and after his death it entered the Louvre in 1824. Canova made a second version, now in the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.

How it was made

Canova began with small terracotta sketches and a full-size plaster model; studio assistants then roughed out the marble using a pointing machine, and Canova himself carried out the final carving. He was famous for the finish: he worked the marble with fine rasps and pumice and is reported to have applied a thin wax patina so that the surface took on a warm, skin-like glow, often studied by candlelight. The group was also designed to be seen in the round; Canova's works were sometimes displayed on rotating stands.

Close looking

The composition is built from two crossing diagonals: Cupid's wings and body form one line from upper right to lower left, Psyche's raised arms and torso another. Where they cross, at the faces, is the heart of the piece. Around this point everything is open. Light passes between the arms, between the faces, through the gap under Cupid's wing, so the marble seems weightless.

In the detail shown here, notice the hands. Cupid's fingers support Psyche's head so lightly they barely press the hair. Psyche's fingers, in contrast, are spread wide and firm against his skull: she is the one holding on. Notice too the curls on Cupid's head, each a separate drilled spiral, set against the smooth, polished planes of his face.

Canova in Rome

Antonio Canova (1757–1822) was born in Possagno in the Veneto and trained in Venice before moving to Rome in 1781, where he quickly became the leading sculptor in Europe. His clients included popes, Napoleon and his family, and British collectors on the Grand Tour, like Colonel Campbell. Canova's studio was itself a sight for visitors, who came to watch the work in progress and see finished pieces by torchlight. Psyche Revived was one of the works that made his international reputation and fixed the image of Neoclassical sculpture for a generation.

What does it mean?

For Canova's contemporaries the group was a perfect example of Neoclassicism: a subject from antiquity treated with clarity, restraint and idealized beauty, influenced by Winckelmann's call for "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur." Yet it is also intensely sensual, and that tension is why it still affects viewers. It is about love as rescue and awakening, the moment of passing from death to life, and it trusts the viewer to supply the kiss that never quite happens.

Related works

Compare Canova's other treatments of the theme in Cupid and Psyche and his The Three Graces. For the moment before the awakening, see Psyche in a Faint by Pietro Tenerani and Edward Poynter's Psyche in the Temple of Love. Rodin's very different kiss is on The Eternal Idol. More in Famous Sculptures.

Where to see it

The first version is in the Louvre, Department of Sculptures, Denon wing, ground floor (inventory MR 1777). The second version is in the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg.