Around this time year, we always see images of Cupid showing up all over the place. In modern culture, Cupid is always portrayed as a rascally infant armed with a bow and quiver of arrows, but this has not always been how he has been imagined. In fact, his original portrayal was much, much darker…
Cupid, as many of my readers are already well-aware, is the Latin name for the Greek god Eros, the god of sexual desire, from whose name we derive our modern English word erotic. Eros is never mentioned in the Iliad or the Odyssey. He is first attested in the poem Theogonia by the Boiotian poet Hesiodos, which was written in the eighth century BC, probably shortly after the composition of the Homeric epics. Hesiodos characterizes Eros as a primeval deity, one of the very first to emerge from Chaos. He describes Eros’s appearance as follows:
“And Eros, loveliest of all the immortals, who
makes their bodies (and men’s bodies) go limp,
Mastering their minds and subduing their wills.”
For Hesiodos, Eros is not a pudgy infant, but a beautiful and dangerous youth armed with the primeval cosmic powers of love and attraction. We learn more about Eros from the writings of the early Greek lyric poets, who paint an image that is unambiguously terrifying. The poet Ibykos, who flourished during the second half of the sixth century BC, warns that:
“…Eros is at rest in no season,
but like the Thracian north wind
ablaze with lightning,
rushing from Aphrodite with scorching
fits of madness, dark and unrestrained,
[he] forcibly convulses, from their very roots
my mind and heart.”
Similarly, in early artistic representations, Eros is never shown as an infant, but rather as a nude adolescent with long, white feathered winged.
ABOVE: Attic red-figure bobbin from circa 470-450 BC, showing Eros as a handsome naked youth
The Greek poets not only describe Eros as dangerous; they actively demonstrate it. In Euripides’s tragedy Hippolytos, at Aphrodite’s orders, Eros causes Theseus’s second wife Phaedra to fall madly and passionately in love with Hippolytos, the son of Theseus by his previous wife. Phaedra begs Hippolytos to make love to her, but Hippolytos, an avowed lifelong virgin, refuses. Phaedra is so infuriated by his refusal that she commits suicide and leaves a suicide note for Theseus telling him that Hippolytos tried to rape her. Theseus prays to Poseidon to unleash his wrath upon his own son. While Hippolytos is riding by the sea in his chariot, Poseidon sends a wild bull to scare the horses, who bolt, smashing the chariot and dragging Hippolytos, who is still caught in the reins, to a bloody death across the rocky shore.
The first mention of Eros as the son of Aphrodite comes from the poetess Sappho, who lived in the sixth century BC (about a hundred years before Euripides). This notion of Eros as Aphrodite’s son, however, did not become cemented until much later. Eros first begins to shift from the terrifying cosmic force envisioned by the early Greeks into his more familiar contemporary form in the early fourth century BC when he starts to appear in artwork as a winged infant alongside his mother Aphrodite as a way of showing him as subservient to her.
ABOVE: Apuleian red-figure vase painting from circa 330 BC showing Eros as a winged infant resting in the arms of his mother Aphrodite, as she plots with Zeus to help him seduce the mortal princess Leda
In Hellenistic artwork, images of Eros as a winged infant begin to proliferate, but they are forced to compete with more traditional images of him as a young man.
ABOVE RIGHT: The Eros Farnese, a marble statue of Eros from Pompeii, thought to perhaps be a copy of a fourth-century BC statue by the Athenian sculptor Praxiteles, showing Eros as a naked youth
ABOVE LEFT: The Capitoline Eros, a Roman copy of a fourth-century BC statue by the Sikyonian sculptor Lysippos, showing Eros as a winged infant stringing his bow
It was not until the Roman period that the image of Eros/Cupid as an infant became finally cemented as canonical. It was also during the Roman period that Cupid first began to be shown riding on the back of a dolphin, an iconographic characteristic which would continue long into the modern era. Even after the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, many people still continued to believe in the pagan gods of old, but, rather than seeing them as deities to be worshipped, they saw them as demons or lesser beings. This was especially the case for Cupid. Early Christians identified Cupid as a “demon of fornication,” who spreads lust and carnal debauchery.
In the late fifth century AD, Fulgentius of Ruspe analyzed mosaics of Venus with Cupids from North Africa, interpreting Venus as a symbol of lust, but completely ignoring the Cupids surrounding her, describing Cupid only as an “archer god.” The medieval writer Theodulf of Orleans, who lived during the reign of Emperor Charlemagne, interpreted Cupid’s quiver as a symbol of his “depraved mind,” his bow as a symbol of his “trickery,” his arrows as the “poison” of lust, and his torch as “the ardour of love.”
ABOVE: Fourteenth century manuscript illumination showing a winged and crowned Cupid firing his arrow into the breast of an unsuspecting maiden
Cupid’s reputation was rehabilitated during the Renaissance, when poets and artists began to use him as a symbol of romantic love rather than mere lustful desire. It was during this time period that Cupid first began to be commonly shown blindfolded.
ABOVE: Cupid Blindfolded (1452 or 1466) by Piero della Francesca
Perhaps the most famous exegesis of Cupid comes from Act I, Scene I of William Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which the character Helena explains why he is shown blindfolded:
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
Nor hath love’s mind of any judgement taste;
Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste.
And therefore is love said to be a child
Because in choice he is so oft beguiled.
The Baroque artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries loved Cupids and put them in nearly all their paintings and sculptures. The nineteenth century Romantic artists loved Cupid almost as much and he continued to appear, not only as a symbol of love and romance, but equally as often as merely a decorative symbol.
ABOVE: Cupid Riding on a Dolphin (1630) by Erasmus Quellinus II
In the nineteenth century, after people began sending Valentine’s Day cards, Cupid’s long-established associations with love and romance made him an optimal decoration for Valentine’s Day cards. This was the beginning of Cupid’s association with Valentine’s Day, an association which has continued to this very day.
