Amor Asleep

What hangs here is part of a larger picture. On the right there was once Psyche, holding up her lamp, and curtains closed the scene in. Both are gone, and the full composition is known only from the oil sketch Rubens made for it, now in the Musée Bonnat in Bayonne. Apuleius tells the story in book 5 of his Metamorphoses. Psyche's husband came to her only at night and forbade her to look at him, so she carried a lamp to the bed while he slept and found the god of love, hair like threads of gold, neck white as milk. Wax from the lamp fell on him, he woke, and she was sent away to work through the tasks Venus set her. Erasmus Quellinus painted the canvas between 1636 and 1638. It was catalogued as school of Rubens until 1973, although a royal inventory of 1700 had already put it down to "Erasmo de Clinio". The Prado keeps it on deposit at the Museo de Belas Artes da Coruña.