Cupid

Apollo, read by Greg Giordano.

Cupid, read by Michael Faiss.

Peneus, read by Alan Mapstone.

Venus, read by Agnes Robert Baer.

Daphne.

Scene one.

Cupid is playing with his bow and arrows on Parnassus.

Apollo bids him leave such weapons for stronger hands.

So James, I believe you might be referring to, uh, a figure or possibly two figures at Augustus' foot.

Uh, and what we can see is we have a small figure, winged figure, a male figure, so, um, a, a, a, a putto, a sort of a cupid, and it probably is Cupid or Eros, riding on a dolphin.

And this has normally been interpreted as, as Eros, as Cupid, the divine son of Aphrodite, Venus, who is, as you pointed out, uh, the mother of Aeneas and the mother of the entire Julian family through that line, as we know from, uh, Virgil's Aeneid and, and other poems and literature.

Uh, so this does seem to be...

Uh, going back to your earlier point, uh, about Augustus not having any issues and his having some sort of divine, potentially divine aspect.

Uh, the fact that we have this dolphin and, and Cupid, who is sort of almost tugging on his [laughs] his, uh, tunic skirt, is a further way perhaps of indicating his divine associations, his divine lineage.

I have also read at least one scholar arguing that because on the breastplate you have the heavens and the earth, we have Cupid riding a dolphin, which is the sea.

And in a lot of Augustan rhetoric, we have the idea of peace achieved by land and sea.

Red by DC.

Cupid.

Red by shrimp fish.

Juno.

Act 3.

Scene 1.

Enter Cupid.

now cupid cause the carthaginian queen to be enamoured of thy brother's looks convey this golden arrow in thy sleeve lest she imagine thou art venus's son and when she strokes thee softly on the head then shall i touch her breast and conquer her

Yeah.

And it works in the mythology of Cupid and Psyche in with kind of contemplation about the connection between faith and reason and all that.

It's probably one of his most difficult books as far as being challenging, but it's so worth it to

me.

And it actually was a beautiful sister and an ugly sister.

It's very much that theme.

The beautiful sister ends up in a relationship with a god, with the god Cupid.

Okay.

Not a lot of Christ and Mary's going on here.

The frescoes we're going to be discussing are predominantly by Raphael, are his Galatea one of his masterworks, I believe, and the Loggia of Cupid and Psyche.

I want to be clear that these are highly collaborative efforts.

So the Loggia of Cupid and Psyche, for example, was certainly designed by Raphael, and he probably executed some of the painting.

However, a lot of it was done by his workshop, who was essentially painting his design.

Those were painted later on, though, in 1518.

rendered quite differently, it seems that a combination of literary sources and contemporary artists had a hand in conceiving Galatea.

And as Galatea rides forward on her sea chariot, it is not the tragic moment of her lover's death that has been depicted, and thus could be read in that parallel between Agostino and Francesca, something we will see throughout the entire decoration of the villa.

This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.

Chapter twelve, The Story of Cupid and Psyche.

Cupid, god of love, was the son of Mars and Venus, and though he was always the happiest of children, his mother was distressed because he never grew up, but remained, year after year, a chubby, dimpled child.

When she consulted Themis, the goddess of justice, to find out why Cupid was never any older, she was told that love cannot grow without passion.

This explanation was at first very mystifying, but later, when Anteros was born, Venus understood the meaning of the strange words.

Cupid then developed into a tall, slender youth, who did not revert to his childish form, except in his brother's absence, when he again became a rosy, mischievous child.

Though grown larger in stature, the god of love still kept his gauzy wings, and always carried a bow and a quiver full of arrows.

No mortal ever saw him, though many knew when he had come and gone.

Apollo, read by Greg Giordano.

Cupid, read by Michael Fays.

Peneus, read by Alan Mapstone.

Venus, read by Agnes Robert-Bear.

Daphne.

Scene 1.

Cupid is playing with his bow and arrows on Parnassus.

Apollo bids him leave such weapons for stronger hands.

But it's a story most people know.

The story that Apollo, struck by Cupid's arrow, becomes massively infatuated with the nymph Daphne.

And he pursues her relentlessly.

despite her clear refusal and then because she's refusing him quite clearly she's transformed into a laurel tree at the moment of being caught escaping him by ceasing to be a human the only escape from him is to become this tree apollo completely undeterred even by this adopts that laurel as his sacred plant and it's worn from then on as a symbol of his devotion to her This is one of the most famous Greek myths in popular imagination, if you like.

Don't get me wrong, there are scattered references connecting Apollo to Laurel and to the nymphs generally.

And Daphne appears marginally and later in different Greek sources.

But the real developed, you know, chase and transformation narrative that we all know, the part with Cupid's arrow as that inciting cause, and also that specific... emotional pursuit and refusal is really an ovidian literary construction it's not well attested earlier greek myth it doesn't have a long independent history so why might ovid build a story this way well partly because it fits his transformation theme absolutely perfectly a person becoming a plant is exactly the kind of metamorphosis his whole poem is organized around but partly because the laurels' genuine, well-attested connection to Apollo in actual Greek religious practice needed some kind of origin story.

In Greek religious practice, the laurel wreaths at Delphi and the laurel in Pythinian ritual are obviously completely linked to Apollo.

Apollo, read by Greg Giordano

Cupid, read by Michael Faiss

Peneus, read by Alan Mapstone

Venus, read by Agnes Robert Baer

Daphne.

Scene one.

Cupid is playing with his bow and arrows on Parnassus.

Apollo bids him leave such weapons for stronger hands