Jacques-Louis David, Cupid and Psyche, 1817
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| Jacques-Louis David, Cupid and Psyche, 1817, oil on canvas, 184.2 x 241.6 cm, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio[1] |
Jacques-Louis David, Cupid and Psyche, 1817, oil on canvas, 184.2 x 241.6 cm, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio
“Love and Psyche,” also known as “Cupid and Psyche,” is an 1817 painting by Jacques-Louis David, currently housed in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Created during David’s exile in Brussels, the painting was commissioned by the patron and collector Gian Battista Sommariva. The artwork depicts the mythological figures Cupid and Psyche, exploring the conflict between idealized love and physical reality. David’s portrayal of Cupid as an ungainly teenager, rather than the traditional idealized adolescent, was a deliberate departure from conventional representations. This painting marked a significant shift in David’s style, incorporating realism and a more nuanced approach to mythological themes.
'ํํผ๋์ ํ์ฌ์ผ'๋ผ๊ณ ๋ ์๋ ค์ง '์ฌ๋๊ณผ ํ์ฌ์ผ'๋ ์ํฌ ๋ฃจ์ด ๋ค๋น๋์ 1817๋ ์ํ์ผ๋ก, ํ์ฌ ํด๋ฆฌ๋ธ๋๋ ๋ฏธ์ ๊ด์ ์์ฅ๋์ด ์์ต๋๋ค. ๋ค๋น๋๊ฐ ๋ธ๋คผ์ ์ ์์ ๋ ๊ทธ๋ฆฐ ์ด ๊ทธ๋ฆผ์ ํ์์์ด์ ์์ง๊ฐ์ธ ์ง์ ๋ฐํฐ์คํ ์๋ง๋ฆฌ๋ฐ์ ์๋ขฐ๋ก ์ ์๋์์ต๋๋ค. ์ด ์ํ์ ์ ํ ์ ์ธ๋ฌผ์ธ ํํผ๋์ ํ์์ผ๋ฅผ ๋ฌ์ฌํ์ฌ ์ด์ํ๋ ์ฌ๋๊ณผ ๋ฌผ๋ฆฌ์ ํ์ค ์ฌ์ด์ ๊ฐ๋ฑ์ ํ๊ตฌํฉ๋๋ค. ๋ฐ์ด๋น๋๋ ํํผ๋๋ฅผ ๊ธฐ์กด์ ์ด์ํ๋ ์ฒญ์๋ ์ด ์๋ ์ด์คํ ์ญ๋๋ก ๋ฌ์ฌํ๋๋ฐ, ์ด๋ ๊ธฐ์กด์ ํํ์์ ์๋์ ์ผ๋ก ๋ฒ์ด๋ ๊ฒ์ด์์ต๋๋ค. ์ด ๊ทธ๋ฆผ์ ์ฌ์ค์ฃผ์์ ์ ํ์ ์ฃผ์ ์ ๋ํ ๋ณด๋ค ๋ฏธ๋ฌํ ์ ๊ทผ ๋ฐฉ์์ ํตํฉํ์ฌ ๋ฐ์ด๋น๋์ ์คํ์ผ์ ์ค์ํ ๋ณํ๋ฅผ ๊ฐ์ ธ์์ต๋๋ค.
Artist
Jacques-Louis David
Title
Cupid and Psyche
Object type
painting
Genre
mythological painting
Description
David used the story of Cupid and Psyche to explore the conflict between idealized love and physical reality. Cupid, lover of the beautiful mortal Psyche, visited her nightly on the condition that she not know his identity. Cupid was usually depicted as an ideal adolescent, but here David presents him as an ungainly teenager smirking at his sexual conquest.David took inspiration from a number of ancient texts, including an obscure, recently published Greek poem by Moschus that describes Cupid as a mean-spirited brat with dark skin, flashing eyes, and curly hair.
Depicted people
Cupid
Psyche
Date
1817
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
Framed: 221 x 282 x 10 cm
Unframed: 184.2 x 241.6 cm
Collection
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Clevelandart_1962.37.jpg


