Psyche Honoured by the People

The four paintings in the Royal Collection (Psyche Honoured by the People, Psyche’s Parents Offering Sacrifice to Apollo, Psyche Served by Invisible Spirits, and Venus Punishing Psyche with a Task) form part of a series of twelve, illustrating incidents from the story of Cupid and Psyche as recounted at considerable length by Apuleius in The Golden Ass (Books 4-6).

In general terms Apuleius tells how Venus sought to punish the young Psyche, whose beauty challenged even that of the goddess of love. Accordingly, Venus instructs Cupid to arrange for an unsuitable match for Psyche, but instead Cupid himself falls in love with her. He installs Psyche in his palace, but chooses to visit her only at night. Psyche’s sisters, however, overcome by jealousy, maintain that her lover is in reality a monster. Her curiosity aroused, Psyche, although strictly forbidden to look at him, observes Cupid by the light of a lamp, but taken by surprise she allows oil from the lamp to fall on Cupid and so wakens him. To punish Psyche for her disobedience Cupid disappears. He is sought far and wide by Psyche, but in vain. Both Cupid and Psyche thus incur the wrath of Venus. Psyche then tries to win back Cupid’s favour by performing numerous well-nigh impossible tasks set for her by Venus. These she undertakes successfully except for the last which involves the recovery of Persephone’s casket from Hades.

Although expressly told not to open it, Psyche is again overcome by curiosity and opens the casket only to find that it does not contain beauty, but a deadly sleep that overwhelms her. At this point Jupiter, encouraged by Cupid, takes pity on Psyche and consents to their marriage in heaven.

Even though the series by Giordano amounts to twelve scenes, the Neapolitan artist by no means depicts the narrative in full, and in this respect the series appears to have been left incomplete. The four scenes chosen here illustrate different parts of the story.

Psyche honoured by the People and Psyche’s Parents offering Sacrifice to Apollo are consecutive incidents from the beginning of the sequence. They refer respectively to the open acknowledgement of Psyche’s beauty that provokes the initial jealousy of Venus, and the anxiety felt by Psyche’s parents on suspecting that the goddess has been angered.

The story of Cupid and Psyche was open to several interpretations, some of which during the Renaissance were of a philosophical disposition, but it would appear that Giordano has concentrated more on the narrative elements. The first composition (Psyche honoured by the People) is possibly derived from the sixteenth-century engraving of the subject by the Master of the Die, which forms part of an extensive and influential series of prints designed by Michael Coxie and illustrating Apuleius’s text with a certain degree of literalness. Several of the subjects treated by the Master of the Die were not included by Giordano. An essential difference is that Giordano depicts Cupid as a youth rather than as a child.

The paintings are late works by the artist dating from 1692-1702, the years when he was in Spain at the court of Charles II. The fluidity of the brushwork, the sheer liquidity of the paint, the spirited inventiveness of the compositions, together with the delicate, refined colours are highly characteristic of Giordano at the height of his powers. The charm of the paintings is enhanced by the reduced scale which Giordano so often eschewed in favour of large decorative schemes. Essentially, the story of Cupid and Psyche was a suitable subject for a court artist. The series may indeed have been painted for Queen Maria Ana, the wife of Charles II of Spain, since they were apparently given by the queen to the Duc de Grammont after the death of the king in 1700.