Cupid and Psyche

The myth of Cupid and Psyche — the beautiful mortal girl loved by the god of love, subjected to impossible trials by the jealous Venus, and ultimately deified — was among the most beloved of ancient mythological narratives in European painting, a story of love's endurance and ultimate transcendence of mortality. Orazio Gentileschi's 1610 canvas, now at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, engages this subject during his Roman years, when mythological and religious commissions competed for his attention. The Hermitage's Italian Baroque holdings are among the world's finest, assembled by Catherine the Great and subsequent Russian imperial collectors who bought heavily from dispersing Italian and French collections in the eighteenth century. Gentileschi's refined, luminous manner suited the story's combination of sensuous beauty and emotional profundity, and the Psyche-Cupid relationship gave him a vehicle for depicting two young figures in intimate proximity under the pretext of mythology.

Canvas with Gentileschi's smooth, layered paint surface and cool directional light. The interaction of two figures — Cupid's winged form and Psyche's more terrestrial beauty — creates compositional dialogue between the divine and mortal. Wings are rendered with fine, layered feather strokes. The figures' skin receives the same careful tonal gradation from shadow to light that characterizes all Gentileschi's figure work.