This volume of conference proceedings was produced by the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours and the Centre des Monuments Nationaux. It assembles research on the reception of the myth of Cupid and Psyche in the realms of philosophy, religion, literature, music, art, and theater. The nineteen essays, written in French, Italian, English, and Spanish, are presented sequentially and divided into two parts: antiquity to the Renaissance and Renaissance to modernity. In actuality, the bulk of the essays address the early modern period, a logical consequence of the myth’s relative obscurity in the Middle Ages and extraordinary popularity in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries.

Véronique Gély, who authored a book-length study of the same topic in 2006, provides a substantive introduction to the essay collection. Apuleius’s tale was revived in the fourteenth century when Florentine scholars rediscovered manuscripts containing The Golden Ass and Boccaccio incorporated the myth into his Genealogia deorum gentilium. The essays by Etienne Wolf, Francesco Bari, and Donatello Coppini cover the transmission of the myth from medieval times to the age of printing. The name Psyche means soul in Greek, and the story of Psyche’s travails and relationship with Cupid is an allegory of the soul’s search for higher truth, in keeping with Apuleius’s Platonic metaphysics. The myth was popular in part because of its polyvalence. For a Christian audience, Psyche’s punishment for daring to see her nocturnal visitor speaks to Augustine’s idea that faith trumps knowledge. The essays by Sonia Cavicchiolli, Olga Vassilieva-Codognet, and Silvia Fabrizio-Costa discuss Christian uses of the myth in frescoes, emblem books, and novellas, respectively. For a secular audience, the Psyche myth, and Apuleuis’s figure of Lucius more broadly, is an emblem of the theoretical curiosity and critical bent that for some historians is the true distinguishing feature of the Renaissance, or, more precisely, the early modern period. The essays by Grantley McDonald, Raffael Carbone, and Joke Boury trace this intellectual thread via investigations of Erasmus, Giordano Bruno, Francesco Colonna, and others. In some Renaissance texts, Neoplatonic and Christian interpretations coexisted, as both embraced concepts of the soul’s immortality (suggested by Psyche’s ascent to Olympus to marry Cupid). Moreover, the figure of Cupid/Eros conjoined with Psyche could represent various notions, including love defined as spiritual union with the divine, voluptas, desire, destructive carnality, and embodiment.

As Ute Heidmann observes, the Psyche myth is a coming-of-age story, that is, a sentimental education for women in Charles Perrault’s adaptations and Jean de la Fontaine’s rewriting of the myth. Essays by Ian Grivel and Camilla Cavicchi explore adaptations of the myth in musical and theatrical genres. Another group of essays attests to the long Nachleben of Psyche in the visual arts. The famous Brussels tapestry set belonging to Francis I gave rise to a large number of copies, which are the subject of Jean Vittet’s essay. The essay by Aundrey Nassieu-Maupas discusses Parisian tapestries of the same subject, which employed the series of engravings by the Master of the Die after Michel Coxcie as their main source. As Aziza Gril-Mariotte notes, the Master of the Die engravings continued to serve as models into the nineteenth century, when French manufacturers produced wallpaper and printed-cloth wall coverings depicting the story of Cupid and Psyche. Magali Bélime-Droguet explores a room of Serlio’s chateau of Ancy-le-Franc that was decorated with frescoes at the end of the sixteenth century to celebrate the patron’s marriage. The author of the frescoes is unknown, and they have suffered extensively from overpainting and reconstruction. Once again, the Master of the Die series is mentioned as a visual source.

As for depictions or performances of Psyche that relate to Renaissance marriage celebrations, the tradition is particularly rich: Raphael’s Villa Farnesina frescoes, numerous examples of cassoni and spalliere, and the intermedi for the 1565 marriage of Francesco de’ Medici are but a few examples. The Villa Farnesina frescoes are amply treated elsewhere in the art historical literature, and Camilla Cavicchi’s essay does address the intermedi. However, these kinds of concordances would have risen to the surface had the editors chosen thematic groupings instead of a chronological arrangement of essays. Individual essays on Quattrocento cassoni and spalliere, the Master of the Die engravings, Canova’s neoclassical sculptures, and Molière’s ballet tragedy would have been welcome additions. Such gaps in coverage are perhaps inevitable in an interdisciplinary, multiauthor volume spanning almost two millennia. On the whole, it is a remarkable compilation of humanistic findings, which in some respects calls to mind Victor Stoichita’s 2008 diachronic study of the Pygmalion myth.