(Detail from the Loggia of Cupid & Psyche)
Yesterday I returned to the Villa Farnesina in Janiculum to check out the frescoes inside, particularly the Raphaels. Wow. A gorgeous villa, all the more breathtaking because every wall sports scores of visual interpretations of classical mythology. It's amazing to think that so many of the best painters were inspired by the best poets! Interesting too that the theme running through so many of these works seems to be that 'untamed desire really does transform the bearer' - ie. the central theme of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the main source for these Greek & Roman myths of transformation.
The Loggia of Cupid and Psyche (detail above) - depictions of which fill an entire room in the villa - is based not on Ovid, but on the three-part account of these lovers in Apulius' The Golden Ass. As soon as I got home, I read these tales in the English translation, and it's amazing how much more you can get from the work, even in hindsight, with a knowledge of the myth, which is summed up rather crudely as follows:
1. gorgeous girl, youngest of three sisters, is so famed for her beauty that Venus becomes jealous;
2. said jealous godess instructs her son Cupid to ruin the young woman, Psyche, by making her fall in love with some hideous beast;
3. directly contradicting his mother's wishes, naughty Cupid falls in love with Psyche himself; her own sisters also get jealous and try to ruin her (scene above), but get their just desserts;
4. Venus tries everything to 'get rid' of Psyche, but can't, as the innocent mortal is aided at every turn by some god or other;
5. in the end, Jupiter declares that the mischievous Cupid and a now-pregnant Psyche are to marry, and the story ends in a wonderful wedding feast.
Of course, the joy is in the poetry - and in this case, the paintings. The room is covered top to bottom with different scenes from this story.
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Dear Raphael,
Please don't begrudge me taking the following furtive video of your wonderful fresco, The Triumph of Galatea, in the Villa Farnesina. I know I wasn't supposed to, but I dearly wanted to share it with my friends and family back home - even if the resolution quality on good old youtube doesn't come close to capturing the experience of standing before it. I want you to know I'm writing a poem in response to your masterpiece, though I realise this isn't a fair bargain, as the poem will no doubt pale in comparison. However, I do hope you understand my dilemma,
Yours sincerely,
JS
2 comments:
The cupid/psyche story throws light on some deep truths about human psychology: To desire is to live but to have is to die. Listen up Anna Nicole, Britney and Paris! Love thrives in being UNsatisfied – the plot of most Romantic fiction. There’s so much is in the story – like the cupid/eros, the archetype of desire, prohibiting Psyche from seeing him. Psyche/soul’s desire to see her nightly lover (to check he isn’t the foretold monster) causes him to desert her suggesting that divine imagination is lost when inhibition is removed. Finally they are united only in the abode of the gods – i.e. the imaginal realm of the archetypes. Lust is of the natural world but love is of the divine realm. The conclusion (inherent in the classics but not spelt out till 20th century depth psychology) the motive of creativity is yearning. Yearn away Jaya – and create! Shouldn’t we lock Em up here in NZ :)
Yes Graham! (Not about the locking Em up though!) But yes, I've often thought the Ovidian myths in particular are masterstrokes of psychoanalysis. Echo and Narcissus is my special fave - the lover who can't answer in her own name but must repeat the words of others, the young narcissus who drowns in his own reflection; his tragic over-supply of ego, as it were, contrasted with her equally tragic, ego-lessness.
I know what you mean about yearning being the source of creativity too - for me though this doesn't require the absence of some 'thing' or someone... the very nature of language is that it's always filling in for something that's not present... the act of writing testifies to a fundamental lack inherent in language (which is I think why Lacan says the arrival of language coincides with the birth of repressed desire).
Those myths... such a wondrous strange projection of our own everyday concerns!
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