Claude, The Enchanted Castle

Threatened with marriage to a monster Psyche, a mortal, is blown away by the West Wind. She awakens near a magical palace and falls in love with Cupid. He makes Psyche promise not to look at his divine face, but she breaks this promise and Cupid abandons her. The story is told in Books IV to VI of Metamorphoses, also known as The Golden Ass, written by Apuleius.

Psyche sits in the foreground, deep in thought or melancholy. Claude may have based this figure on an illustration in Apileius' Metamorphoses. However, she looks similar to the figure representing Mediation in a seventeenth-century French edition of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, a book where ideas are shown through images of people with particular expressions and attributes.

Claude perhaps shows the moment before Psyche meets Cupid rather than when he leaves her. However, the figure’s pose does not match the written story, which says she ‘lay flat upon the ground and watched her husband’s flight as far as her sight enabled her’ and then in despair, ‘threw herself over the edge of a nearby river’. Alternatively, this scene may represent another moment in the narrative when Psyche is alone: when her two jealous sisters leave after persuading her to murder Cupid. The two figures in the boat on the right are perhaps her sisters. They also appear in the painting’s pair Landscape with Psyche saved from drowning, now in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne.

This work was painted in 1664 for Lorenzo Onforio Colonna (1637–1689) who had recently married Maria Mancini (1639–1715). Like Psyche, she had come from the west – from France to Rome. Yet the painting’s subject is not a celebratory one but rather alludes to marital difficulties. Ironically, the relationship between Colonna and Mancini was breaking down by 1665, the year before Claude completed both paintings. However, it is unlikely that Claude would have deliberately painted a picture that related so negatively to the couple’s marriage. Neither painting remained in Colonna’s collection by 1679; perhaps he no longer liked the subjects.

In this painting, Cupid’s enchanted castle combines various architectural styles seen by Claude in and around Rome with imaginary examples: the grand exterior of a townhouse or palazzo is attached to circular towers and ruins associated with military fortification. These buildings may reflect the Colonna family’s long-standing profession as builders in Rome. The imposing rocky hillside and sheltered seaside cove shows Claude’s imagination and skill at conveying perspective and scale. The isolated landscape and cool colouring adds to the solemn tone.