Love and Death

This would be quite a short blog if I were to just say, “Hey, one of my photographs was used on a magazine cover, and here it is.” But you know me better than that! First let’s talk about the magazine, or more accurately, the [British] Journal of the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research. One of the editors of the JCFAR had seen my photograph, “Cupid and Psyche,” on my StoneAngels website (www.StoneAngels.net), and emailed me asking if the organization could use it as the cover image for their next issue of its professional journal. The issue would be published in February 2013 (the month in which I am writing this blog, the month of love, as it were), its overall theme being, “On Love.”

I of course said yes, as this would be an interesting topic of conversation between my wife and I, she being, in fact, a psychotherapist. Our worlds again collide – art and mental health (but they are closely related, right?).

Journal of the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research, 
Issue No.23 “On Love”  (Table of Contents):

Lucia Corti   Love Masks....

Julia Borossa   Narratives of Love

Anne Worthington   The Inequalities in Love

Werner Prall   Transference: Seduction and Transcendence

David Henderson   Where is Love?

Astrid Gessert   What Does The Woman Want? - Revisited

Alireza Taheri   Love and the Sexual Non-Rapport

Conditions of Philosophy

From the book, Stone Angels, by Ed Snyder

My own interest in the sculpture of Cupid and Psyche began with research I did in preparation for writing my Stone Angels book, which features my photograph of the statue. When I made the image back in the early 2000s, I was unaware of its mythological and historical significance – I only recognized it as a quite moving piece of sculpture, one of many examples of sensuality and death comingled in the cemetery.

 (Available from Blurb.com)

“Sex and death. Eros and Thanatos. [The psychiatrist Sigmund] Freud believed them to be our inner drives, forces that both coincide and conflict. As humans we seem to be simultaneously sexually driven and death phobic. Death and desire seem to conjugate in some fashion in our minds, a philosophy of opposites.”

“The sculpture in this photograph is a copy of Psyche Revived by Love’s Kiss, by the Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova [1757 - 1822]. The original resides in the Louvre. The one I photographed is in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood, California. The cemetery is cleverly described by its owners as the “final resting place of Hollywood’s immortals,“ which includes, quite appropriately, Rudolph Valentino.”

- Stone Angels (Blurb.com)

The Journal of the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research
 

Victorian Valentine, "Love's Question" (Squidoo.com)

The interest taken in my photograph by the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research for use on its journal cover is easily understood at first blush  – the imagery is essentially that of a Victorian Valentine, and the journal issue is focused on love. However, I believe the sculpture likely has a much deeper meaning to the readers of the journal, the members of the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research. Cupid, or Eros, is waking his love, Psyche, with a kiss. [In Roman mythology, Cupid (Latin Cupido, for "desire") is the god of desire, affection, and erotic love. His Greek mythological counterpart is the god Eros.]

Canova's original sculpture

The sculpture epitomizes not only love, but death as well. Freud theorized that human nature emerged from two basic instincts: Eros and Thanatos, the libido and mortido - the life instinct and death instinct. “He saw in Eros the instinct for life, love and sexuality in its broadest sense, and in Thanatos, the instinct of death, aggression. Eros is the drive toward attraction and reproduction; Thanatos toward repulsion and death. One leads to the reproduction of the species, the other toward its own destruction” (ref. Michael Dunev Art Projects). 

So, then, if Cupid, or Eros, with his erotic embrace, is reviving the woman with a kiss, is she dead? Is Antonio Canova’s sculpture as much about death as it appears to be about love? The meaning behind the statue lies in Greek mythology, not far from Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. It is an allegory about love overcoming death. As a piece of sculpture in a cemetery,  It can easily symbolize life after death – immortality.

Sleeping Beauty

Cupid and Psyche’s story is the earliest recorded version of the “wakened by a lover’s kiss” fairytale. It was told by Lucius Apuleius in his 2nd century AD novel, The Golden Ass (in the novel, the protagonist is turned into a donkey).

 William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1889

Psyche is a (mortal) princess so beautiful that people treat her like a goddess. Potential suitors are reluctant to approach her, and she can therefore find no mate. The goddess Venus is jealous of this so she decides to trick Psyche into a self-imposed “Sleep of the Innermost Darkness,” or coma-like death. Through Venous’ trickery, her own son Cupid becomes Psyche’s secret lover. Psyche implores Venus to help her find her mystery lover, and Venus imposes a series of [seemingly] impossible tasks that Psyche must perform in order to “prove her worth.” One of these tasks was to deliver a jar in which was imprisoned the “treasure of divine beauty.” Psyche wanted some for herself, thinking it might lure her mystery lover to show himself. However, the jar was filled instead with a sleeping potion. In the end, Cupid rescues Psyche from her death-sleep, and she is, as depicted in the statue,“… revived by Love’s kiss.” Cupid implores Zeus to grant Psyche immortality, so that the two lovers can be together forever. Psyche received the gift of immortality so that she could be with Cupid. Together they had a daughter, Voluptas (Greek for "Pleasure"), and they all lived happily ever after. Eros + Psyche (Greek word for the human soul) = Voluptas , i.e.,  erotic desire melded with the human spirit produces pleasure – or something like that.

Conclusion

So we can see that, as with love itself, there is much more to the "Cupid and Psyche" statue than meets the eye. The concepts of life and death touch us all - taphophiles, psychiatrists, sculptors, Disney script writers, and certainly these young lovers locked in a sort of Cupid-and-Psyche embrace that I photographed on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy. In this month of Valentine’s Day, we can see how love is, in fact, a many-splendored thing. Namaste.

References and Further Reading:

Center for Freudian Analysis and Research
Antonio Canova biography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupid

http://www.ynot1.com.au/magazines/EROS%20AND%20THANATOS%20tat.pdf

Hollywood Forever Cemetery website
Greek Myths: Eros and Psyche

Victorian Valentines

The Art of Sensual Statues in Cemeteries

Ah, Valentine’s Day, when people’s fancy turns to love and, let’s face it, sex. On walking through just about any Victorian cemetery established after 1850, one is likely to see sensual female figures, carved from a variety of material – granite, marble, bronze. This is especially true in France and England, the birthplaces of the “garden cemetery.” For the uninitiated, garden cemeteries are essentially outdoor sculpture gardens, conceived in Europe in the Victorian era (1837 – 1901) to try and dispel some of the fear and bleakness associated with death and dying. Pere Lachaise in Paris and Highgate in London are examples.

The practice carried across the Pond in 1831 with the founding of Mount Auburn Cemetery (Cambridge, MA) and then Laurel Hill in 1836 (Philadelphia, PA). Statues in these and other Victorian cemeteries hearken back to a time when these unique memorial gardens served the public as an idyllic getaway from the noisy city. Now forgotten by the public and worn by the elements, this rare artwork was enjoyed by our ancestors long before museums, galleries, and parks came into being.

Now, you’d think statues of semi-nude women would have clashed with staunch Victorian sensibilities, wouldn’t you? Especially in a cemetery – a reverent and respectful place frequented by the public! What role do these women play in the grieving process? They are symbolic, of course, but of what (besides affluence)? These typically life-sized sensual figures do give memorial parks a feeling of life, which really was the intent of the architects of early garden cemeteries.

In his book, Death: The Trip of a Lifetime, Greg Palmer offers that in many cultures, “women are the designated grievers.” Ok, but why physically attractive females? David Robinson says in his book Saving Graces, “Their gowns are revealing and they are often topless and sometimes nude.” He goes on to say that these statues were usually individually commissioned and sculpted, often by famous sculptors. In Western artistic tradition, the ability to accurately depict the female figure is what most defines artistic talent. So again, why physically attractive females? While her countenance may effectively express true sorrow and loss, even anguish, there are no ugly angels.

Besides the fact that most professional sculptors were male (we’ll assume at least some of them, like Rodin, were heterosexual) and these commissions afforded them a regular income, sensual statues provided an opportunity for them to bring their artistic fantasies to life for a noble purpose. A female friend of mine once referred to such sensual mourning statuary as “Mourn Porn.”

Whose is Bigger?

So that covers females, but what about the male nude? Why do we see no copies of Michaelangelo’s (anatomically correct) David in cemeteries? Maybe because the results would generate such public outcry, that the penises would be broken off, as was done to the Oscar Wilde monument in Paris’ Pere Lachaise Cemetery! (Afterwards, the cemetery’s director supposedly used it as a paperweight.)

While its true that we see a male angel once in a great while, most male statues in cemeteries depict the actual deceased man, often in a formal or noble pose. The allusion to male sexuality in mourning art is a bit more subtle, usually. Maybe you have to view it from a female perspective, but don’t all those obelisks below seem a bit phallocentric? In fact the tallest funeral monument in the United States was erected (pun intended) in Philadelphia’s Woodlands Cemetery in 1897, an obelisk that stands 150 feet high (below, left)!

Woodlands Cemetery, Philadelphia

Gee, it seems that when male sexuality is involved, the results get pretty dramatic. There was an incident in a Philadelphia suburb in 2003 that blatantly brought to light the competitive nature between two men. Rival businessmen Goodin (1836-1890) and Gallagher (1834-1915) were both buried in the St. Denis Church Cemetery in Havertown, PA. Goodin died at age 54, leaving orders to erect an imposing 20-foot-tall monolith atop a 10-foot-tall granite base. Church history offers this analysis: "He had to call attention to himself even at his own demise." Missing his friend and favorite adversary, Gallagher slyly bought the neighboring grave plot. He would wait 25 years before death let him claim final victory: an even more magnificent monolith of paler granite set atop an ornate base, the whole structure soaring to a pyramidal point about three feet higher than Goodin's highest point. In 2003, a storm toppled both monoliths.

So let's try to put all this Mourn Porn in perspective. If death is portrayed as beautiful, perhaps it will lose its sting. For Romeo and Juliet, as with the Romantic era in general (1825 – 1900), death was the focus of extreme emotion and the ultimate expression of love (Robinson, 1995). This period of time coincides with Victorian era, in which the idea of death in art and popular culture became less associated with horror and fright and more with love and desire. No other era in Western culture has ever exhibited to such an extent the artistic emphasis on death as a visible part of the consciousness of an entire population.

In her book Mourning Art and Jewelry, Maureen DeLorme tells us that the pressures of continually facing death as an intrusion (French Revolution, Napoleanic Wars, high mortality from plagues and disease, etc.) made the need to keep both the presence of the departed near at hand while at the same time bidding farewell. So the idea of sculpted sensual beings in cemeteries became a tangible realization of a new Western psychology. Their purpose? To comfort the living and soften the finality of death. While angels may epitomize the tension between freedom and confinement, the sensuals walk the tightrope between spiritual purity and earthly desire. Undeniably conflicting, yet totally human forces of nature.

Links of Interest:

Death: The Trip of a Lifetime by Greg Palmer
Read about the Woodlands Cemetery, and America's tallest cemetery monument!
Read about the competitive businessmen and their toppled obelisks!