Cupid

 By Agnolo Bronzino

The Roman god Cupid symbolically represents masculine love.  The Greek equivalent are the Erotes, not Eros.  Eros personifies the function of Divine Love.  Aphrodite/Venus [female] and Cupid/Erotes [male] represent the functions of love that we possess ourselves.

The Greek symbolism of masculine love was more sophisticated than that of the Romans.  Cupid was portrayed by the Romans as a mischievous child,  later on, personifications made him more of an irresponsible adolescent.  This child wielded arrows which delivered desire, obsession, lust, but also romantic love and rejected love - thus symbolically the functions of Cupid and the Erotes were similar.  Cupid was also representative of  sexual intercourse, he too like Venus, was worshipped as a fertility deity.

Observations

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• Anacreon - As Late I sought the Spangled Bowers
• Bayard Taylor - Poems of the Orient – Kamadeva
• Bouguereau - Cupid and Psyche
• Bouguereau - Le Guepier
• Cohen, Leonard - Alexandra leaving
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor - Kisses
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor - Reason for Love's Blindness
• Dante - Paradiso - Venus and love
• Denis - Cupid and Psyche
• Ovid - Metamorphoses - Cupid and Daphne
• Ovid - Metamorphoses - The Song of the Muses
• Poussin - Sleeping Venus and Cupid
• Von Stuck, Franz - 1887 Amor imperator
• Von Stuck, Franz - Cupid at the Masked Ball