Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss: How a Canova Marble Commissioned by a Scotsman Ended Up in the Louvre

Every time I’m in Paris with a few hours to spare, I end up in the Louvre. And every time I’m in the Louvre, I end up in Room 403 of the Denon wing, standing in front of the same piece of white marble, marveling at it along with everyone else.

Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, carved by Antonio Canova between 1787 and 1793, sits on a low plinth, allowing visitors to walk all the way around it. What almost nobody reads on the wall label is the story of how the sculpture got there. 

From a Scottish colonel on the Grand Tour to a widow trying to keep her children fed in exile, it went on quite the journey. 

The Story Behind Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss

The myth comes from Apuleius, a 2nd-century AD Roman writer, who told the story of Cupid and Psyche as a long inset tale inside his novel The Golden Ass. Psyche is a mortal princess so beautiful that Venus gets jealous and sends Cupid to ruin her. 

Cupid falls in love with her instead, and they marry in secret, on the condition that Psyche never tries to see his face. She does, of course, and he leaves. She wanders the earth looking for him, and Venus sets her a series of impossible tasks.

The last task is the one Canova chose. Venus sends Psyche down to the underworld to fetch a box from Proserpina, with strict instructions not to open it. Psyche, being Psyche, opens it on the way back. 

Instead of the beauty ointment she expected, the box contains a Stygian sleep, and she falls down as if dead by the roadside. Cupid, who’s been watching, flies down, wipes the sleep from her face, and wakes her with the touch of an arrow, or in some retellings, a kiss.

Canova picked the second. Not the rescue itself, not the kiss, but the half-second in between, when Cupid has already lifted her and Psyche is just coming back to consciousness. Her hands are rising toward his face. His arms are under her shoulders and around her waist, and they’re suspended in the moment before contact. 

So now you know the story behind the statue, who commissioned it, and why.

Colonel John Campbell and the 1787 Commission

In 1787, a young Scottish officer named John Campbell, later 1st Baron Cawdor, was in Rome doing what wealthy British men of his generation did. He was on the Grand Tour, buying antiquities, sitting for portraits, and visiting the studios of the artists everyone in London was talking about. 

Canova, then 30 years old and already the most sought-after sculptor in Europe, had a studio near the Via delle Colonnette that functioned as a kind of pilgrimage site for visiting collectors.

Campbell commissioned a marble group on a subject from Apuleius. The composition was finished as a full-scale plaster model by 1789 and carved in marble between 1790 and 1793.

Campbell never received it. Some accounts point to the cost of shipping a fragile marble group across a war-torn Europe after 1792. 

Others suggest Campbell simply lost interest, or that his finances had tightened. The sculpture sat in Canova’s studio, admired by every visitor who passed through, until a buyer arrived who had no trouble at all paying for it or moving it.

Joachim Murat Walks into the Studio

In 1800, the buyer was Joachim Murat. He was the son of an innkeeper from Gascony who’d risen through the cavalry to become one of Napoleon’s favorite generals. He was flamboyant, vain about his uniforms, and by most contemporary accounts a brave soldier. 

The next year, he’d marry Caroline Bonaparte, Napoleon’s youngest sister, and the marriage would carry him through grand duchies and eventually onto the throne of Naples in 1808.

Murat bought the Psyche and Cupid directly from Canova, along with a second commission, a reclining figure of a nymph. He installed the marble at the Château de Villiers, his country house near Neuilly, and later moved it with him to Naples. 

For 15 years, the most famous piece of contemporary sculpture in Europe sat in a private collection. Murat’s reign in Naples ended badly. He switched sides during the collapse of the Empire in 1814, switched back during the Hundred Days, lost his throne, and was captured in Calabria in October 1815 after a botched attempt to reclaim it. 

He was tried by a Bourbon military court and shot by firing squad at Pizzo on October 13. He was 48, and said to have refused a blindfold and given the order to fire himself.

Caroline, the Children, and the Long Years in Exile

Caroline Bonaparte Murat was now a widow with 4 children, no throne, and a houseful of art that had to be packed up and moved. She took the title Countess of Lipona, an anagram of Napoli, and settled first in Austria under the watchful eye of Metternich. 

The Habsburgs let her keep her collection, but kept her on a short leash politically. The Psyche traveled with her, crated and uncrated as the family moved between Trieste, Frohsdorf, and various rented villas.

She needed money. The Bourbons in Naples had confiscated the bulk of the Murat estates. Caroline spent the years after 1815 trying to claw back what she could through lawyers in Vienna and Paris, while also selling off pieces to fund the household. 

Her son Lucien, her daughter Letizia, and the family’s debts all had claims on the collection. The Canova was the most valuable thing she owned.

In the early 1820s, negotiations began with the French crown. Louis XVIII, and after his death in September 1824, his brother Charles X, wanted Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss for the royal collection. 

The price was 30,000 francs, paid through intermediaries, and the deal was finalized in 1824. The sculpture entered the Musée du Louvre that same year. Caroline lived another 15 years and died in Florence in 1839, never having returned to Naples.

Why There Are Two Canova Psyches

Anyone who’s been to the Hermitage in St Petersburg, or seen photographs from it, will know there’s a second version of the same composition there. The story behind that one is shorter and involves a Russian who simply wouldn’t take no for an answer.

In 1796, Prince Nikolai Yusupov visited Canova’s studio in Rome. The original Campbell marble was finished or nearly so, and Yusupov wanted it. Canova told him it was already sold. Yusupov asked for another one, and Canova agreed to make it. 

So between 1796 and 1801, he carved a second autograph version, working from the same plaster model but making small adjustments to the surface and the base. Yusupov took delivery of it and installed it at his estate at Arkhangelskoye, outside Moscow, where it remained until the Soviet state moved it to the Hermitage in the 20th century.

The two marbles aren’t identical. The Louvre version has a slightly different treatment of Psyche’s drapery and a base carved with a small rocky outcrop. The Hermitage version sits on a plain plinth. But both were carved by Canova’s own hands, which is why both are cataloged as originals rather than as a primary and a copy. 

Canova did this fairly often with his most famous compositions. The Three Graces exists in two autograph versions as well, one at the Hermitage and one shared between the V&A and the National Galleries of Scotland.

Room 403 and What You’re Actually Looking At

The Louvre moved the sculpture around a few times over the centuries, but it’s been in the Denon wing on the ground floor for a long while now, in the rooms set aside for Italian sculpture of the 18th and 19th centuries. Room 403, the Michelangelo Gallery 

If you come in through the Pyramid and head for the Denon wing, you can walk to it in about 10 minutes if the crowd around the Mona Lisa hasn’t backed up the staircases.

Canova carved it as a composition in the round, with the X-shape of the two bodies opening into different shapes from every angle. From the front, the figures form a near-perfect diamond. 

From the side, you see the curve of Psyche’s back and the upright sweep of Cupid’s wings. From behind, the wings dominate, and the two heads almost disappear.