Cupid Playing with a Butterfly
by Antoine-Denis Chaudet (1763 – 1810)
Marble, 1802-1807 | Louvre, Paris
Chaudet went to the seine river in Paris to look for a model for this masterpiece. Approaching the young nude Parisian boys swimming. There was a misunderstanding about what he wanted from a nude young boy. This landed him in jail.
The pose, the almost suave charm of the face, the delicate fingers, the refined treatment of the hair: everything expresses sensitivity, reserve, and grace. The sculptor has achieved a subtle balance between nature and the ideal, inherited from the 18th century.
Cupid is portrayed as a naked, unarmed adolescent whose sole attributes are his short wings. He seems to be engrossed in an innocent pastime. His amusement is not as harmless as it seems, though; the butterfly allowing itself to be seduced by his rose symbolizes the soul, Psyche in Greek. Imprisoned by Cupid, the soul soon experiences love’s torments rather than its pleasures. The graceful bas-relief friezes on the base develop the theme: if the butterfly tastes the juice of a basket of flowers, it is pinned down by chubby little cupids, one of whom enslaves it by harnessing it to his chariot. But the soul finally triumphs thanks to the bees: infuriated by the arrows shot at their hive, they swarm all over the cheeky imps. These scenes are inspired by the Idylls of Theocritus (3rd century BC), the most famous Greek poet of the Alexandrian era, and the delicateness of the carving expresses all their bucolic charm. [Louvre]
Nice ass at least. scnr
I think a trip to the Louvre is getting more and more interesting ;)
Thank Goodness for those pesky bees :-) Us!
Haha, the incident on the Seine is sweet. Any man wishing to capture a boy’s image must be suspect – they are beautiful, they are beautiful because they are sexy. Anybody looking must be looking at his cock, right?
Nowadays, of course, to take a boy home we don’t need to ask him to spend hours naked, alone with us in a studio as Rudé did: the modern miracle of photography means we can snap him up in an instant. Maybe that’s one reason why they don’t bathe naked in the Seine any more. I still find it fascinating, though, that this exquisite piece of porn should have been praised as high art, and still is, in hypocritical times in which boys are banned from bathing naked in case the ‘wrong kind of person’ looks at them. Posh people, connoisseurs of fine art are, of course, immune from sexual perversion, so it’s OK for them to see as much cock as they want; I guess, through the even-more-modern miracle of performance and installation art, they’ll be able to have a good suck too.
I’m not entirely sure how you were able to misconstrued this as porn, BoyMagnet.
art, noun: the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.
porn, noun: creative activity (writing or pictures or films etc.) of no literary or artistic value other than to stimulate sexual desire.
Boymagnet, I highly doubt that your username is in anyway accurate. You are probably a grossly overweight, older man who has a compulsive masturbatory problem. There is nothing wrong with your attraction to the beauty of naked youth but is it necessary to focus on the sexual aspect instead of just appreciating the beauty? Your over-sexualized sentiment is strikingly similar to the mirror opposite hetero mentality of “fuck it or kill it” that so many straight men enjoy. Please grow up. No one is a bad person for finding youth stimulating or even sexually arousing, but they are certainly immature if not sick, if they use this to ignore the obvious fact that the manipulation and objectification of children is wrong. Please leave your filthy mind to yourself, your jackoff comments are better suited for a chan board.
Thanks! I learn something almost every time I visit your blogsite. This is one of your best attributes: Intelligent Commentary.
I really enjoyed reading the commentary, I think Cupid’s torments are something we can all relate to :-)
I believe the statue appears to be a pre-adolescent cupid. Still a very nice work of art but it seems younger.
@David
The official description of the Louvre says he’s an adolescent, why do you think he’s pre-adolescent? oO
@Bericender
I recommend Musée d’Orsay. The statues just rock, I especially loved Young Aristotle.
Has anyone checked out the fountain and statuary outside the state capitol in staid, conservative Des Moines, IA?
The statue is beautiful! The male form in art is fascinating and rightly so.
@jsween Gosh, I seem to have offended you with my use of forbidden words, I’m sorry. I was trying to reflect ironically on the difficulties of taking innocent beauty as such – when even this statue’s creator managed to get arrested for trying to make it.
I fear that my feeble words, like Rudé’s efforts in stone, will always be misunderstood by somebody. Do you work for the Sureté, perhaps?
Boymagnet, thanks for explaining your intent. So put it’s fine. However, you didn’t succeed in presenting your point. I, too, found it unnecessarily crude, and thought it was intended to be taken as seriously and obscenely as Jsween did. I’m glad to have been wrong in so interpreting it, but it is, even on rereading, a little hard to read it as you intended it.
Anyway that staue is a work of rare beauty.
I’m sorry, English isn’t my native language, so sometimes I get the words muddled up. Anyway, I think we’re all agreed that the naked Cupid symbolizes the very best kind of innocence :-)
David, Cupid looks younger because the age of onset of puberty has changed due to improvements in nutrition. Puberty, the physical side of adolesence, today is at the very beginning of adolesence and may occur as young as 11 or 12 in a boy. In the late 18th century, however, puberty may not have occurred until a boy was well into adolesence, perhaps when he was 15 or 16. So there is nothing strange in the context of the time about a pre-pubesecent adolescent Cupid.
To come straight forward: I guess you’re talking about his small dick: That’s perfectly fine even for the sculpture of a 20 years old — it has nothing to do with puberty but with the classical ideal of a boy.
Boy Magnet: I would not agree that Cupid represents innocence. Cupid, or Eros in Greek, was not innocent at all; he was a devious trickster.
Jean-Francois: I think your attempt to distinguish “art” from “porn” is far too simplistic. Neither art nor porn has any rigid definition, and the defintion you give to porn as something that is “of no literary or artistic value” is innacurate. That is the definition of “obscenity,” not “pornography,” which has never been defined legally (at least in the US). More importantly, works of art often resist simple categorization. Your definitions suggest that art and porn are mutually exclusive categories, when such is not the case. Art can be pornographic (or erotic, if you will), and pornography (or erotica) can be artistic.