The Rape of Psyche

Serie: Large Format Artworks

Technique: Latex on canvas

Size: 148 x 260 cm

Year: 2003

William Adolphe Bouguereau (France, 1825-1905)

According to legend, immortalized by Apuleius in his Metamorphosis (The Golden Donkey), Psyche was the youngest of three sisters daughters of an Anatolian king and the most beautiful of them.

Aphrodite, jealous of her beauty, sent her son Eros (Cupid) to shoot her an arrow of oxidized gold, which would make her fall in love with the most horrible and mean man she could find.

However, Eros fell in love with her and threw the arrow into the sea; when Psyche fell asleep, he flew her to his palace.

To avoid the wrath of his mother, once he has Psyche in his palace, Eros always shows up at night, in the dark, and prohibits Psyche from any inquiry into her identity.

Every night, in the dark, they loved each other. One night, Psyche told his lover that he missed his sisters and wanted to see them.

Eros accepted, but also warned her that her sisters will want to end her bliss.

The next morning, Psyche was with her sisters who enviously asked her who her wonderful husband was.

Psyche, unable to explain what her husband was like since she had not seen him, hesitated and told them that he was a young man who was hunting, but ended up confessing the truth, that he really did not know who he was.

Thus, Psyche's sisters convinced her to turn on a lamp in the middle of the night and observe her beloved, since surely he would only be a monster and therefore want to hide his true appearance.

Psyche listens to them, Psyche decided one night to light a lamp. A drop of boiling oil fell on the face of the sleeping Eros, who awoke and left his lover in disappointment.

When Psyche realizes what she has done, she begs Aphrodite to return the love of Eros, but the goddess, spitefully, orders her to perform four tasks, almost impossible for a mortal, before recovering her divine lover.

As a fourth job, Aphrodite demands Psyche to go find a chest in Hades.

When he manages to get there, Persephone, goddess of the afterlife, tells him that what is in the chest is only for Aphrodite.

Psyche, tempted by the power that could give her what was in that chest, forgets that curiosity had already ruined her life once, and opens it, but instead of finding power, she finds eternal sleep.

Psyche falls into the sleeping grass for all eternity, but Eros, pitying, rescues her and solves things.

Later, Aphrodite and Psyche make peace, and remain together with Eros on Olympus.

Etymology of the word psyché

The verb ψυχω means “to blow” and from this verb, ψυχη is the “breath or breath” that the human being exhales upon death. Thus, later it has come to mean "life", which also escapes from the corpse.

Representing the "soul", as an ethereal image of the dead, a kind of figurine or double of the deceased, an eidolon, which goes to the infernal kingdom of Hades; where it would survive in a dark and ghostly way.

According to Homer many times, the psyche flies out of the mouth of the person who dies as if it were a butterfly (which is also written in Greek as psyche); reason, why some people also relate to the butterfly as a Psychopomp.