0002Achilles_Westmacott

Gallery
Ovid Met.

Reinhold Begas
“Mercury and Psyche” 1874–78
“Amor and Psyche” 1854–57
“Pan comforts Psyche” 1857–58
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

A trio of classical white marble sculptures depicting mythological scenes and figures

German sculptor Begas visited the Cupid and Psyche myth multiple times, a fitting story for the Romantic period. Romanticism dealt with the idea of giving up reason in favor of emotions, and this is personified in the character Psyche. She, the embodiment of the mind, falls in love with Love himself, representing the abdication of the mind to the heart. As she gives in to her curiosity and uses the lamp to see his face, the light of the knowledge hurts her rather than helps her, as she loses her husband because of her need to know more, whereas the artists of the Enlightenment era would have argued that knowledge alone is man’s salvation. Psyche also finds comfort with Pan, the wild god of nature, instead of a more rational divinity.

OGCMA slides are designed by Roger T. Macfarlane for use in Classical Civilization 241 courses at Brigham Young University.
The present resource contains information assembled for The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1400 – 1990’s, edited by J. Davidson Reid (Oxford 1994), and it is used with express permission from Oxford University Press.
Address concerns or inquiries to macfarlane@byu.edu.