There being many kinds of love, the Ancients evolved several winged forms to represent these.  Called ‘erotes’  (from ‘Eros’, love).

 

 

Striding Lions with Erotes children, bronze; produced from molds by indirect lost wax casting.

Yemen, Wadhi Bayhan, early 1st century BCE to mid-1st century CE. Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art, Washington, DC

 

 

Two of the erotes are in this painting.

 

 

Venus Blindfolding Cupid, between 1566 and 1580, oil on canvas. 

Followers of Titian whose painting of the same title remains in Italy.  National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC from its website

 

The one behind Venus is thought to be Anteros: a brother of Cupid who represents virtuous, clear-eyed love: love that is returned. 

 

The one whom Venus is blindfolding is Cupid, the god of sensuous, blind, folly-full, passionate, love.  A madness whose addictive qualities can take over your life.

 

 

 

 

The Fist
Derek Walcott, 1930-2017, Saint Lucian 

 from Collected Poems: 1948-1984.

 

The fist clenched round my heart
loosens a little, and I gasp
brightness; but it tightens
again. When have I ever not loved
the pain of love? But this has moved

 

past love to mania. This has the strong
clench of the madman, this is
gripping the ledge of unreason, before
plunging howling into the abyss.

 

Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.

 

 

Cupid’s Hunting Fields, 1880; oil and gold paint on gesso relief on mahogany panel, and detail.

  Edward Burne-Jones, British, 1833-1898.  Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington

 

 

Trained in archery by his father, Mars, the war god, Cupid does not miss his targets.

 

The god is blindfolded because the love he represents is blind; not anchored in reality.

His lead-tipped arrows are for both the initiation and ending of  such star-crossed love.

 

It his his brother, Anteros, who carries the gold-tipped arrows of virtuous, reciprocated  love.

 

The  women are cowering. 

There are no men in sight. The first wave of Feminism had not arrived by the time of this painting…

 

 

Cupid’s Hunting Fields, 1885; gouache with watercolour and gold and silver paints on ivory wove paper, laid down on linen canvas.

  Edward Burne-Jones, British, 1833-1898.  Chicago Art Institute from their website

 

 

The artist, Edward Burne-Jones, a Pre-Raphaelite, knew Cupid well.

 

Married, he began a public, passionate affair with the Greek-British artist, Maria Zambaco, 1843-1914, a member of a commercially successful family.  

This lasted from 1866 to c.1869 with aftereffects lingering to 1871.  In 1869, he attempted to leave his wife, unsuccessfully, to huge scandal.

 

Police were called to Little Venice in London where Maria Zambaco was attempting to persuade him to a joint suicide pact.

 

Thereafter, they kept in sundry contact.

 

After 1870, Edward Burne-Jones painted Maria Zambaco as a temptress, a sorceress: the victim of Cupid‘s arrow.

 

For him it is women who are the target of Cupid‘s lead arrows.  They are the irrational, passionate, order-destroying ones. 

 

A myth as old as Lilith, as Eve. 

 

But not as old as Zeus who, with other Olympian gods, spent their hegemony in a state of passion  without even the need of  Cupid‘s lead arrows.  Passion for one mortal or immortal after another. 

 

Until the Christians relayed the Olympians to the deep background.

 

All except for Cupid. 

 

With advancing materialist capitalism,  our symbolic, religious and spiritual insights in muddled retreat, 

 

we, become gods, have simplified, cutified, chubbified, denatured, commodified, and transformed Cupid into a benevolent, happy little cupid.