Cupid and Psyche

Gerard showed this at the Paris Salon of 1798, a few years after the Terror had ended and while the young general Bonaparte was off invading Egypt. The public was tired of blood and hungry for something cool and perfect, and Gerard, a pupil of David, gave it to them. Psyche, the human soul in the old myth, receives her first kiss from Cupid, the god of love. She feels it on her forehead but cannot see him, for he is invisible to her, and the butterfly hovering over her head is the soul itself. The skin is polished to porcelain, the outlines clean and unhurried. It made his name almost overnight and set a fashion that painters across Europe copied for years, this chilled marble smoothness laid over a warm subject.