Cupid and Psyche

In the tale told by the Roman writer Apuleius, Psyche's jealous sisters persuade her that the husband who comes to her only in the dark is a monster. She creeps in at night with a lamp and a blade, and here she holds both as she leans over the sleeping Cupid. In recent decades this canvas was treated as a copy of a composition by the Venetian painter Padovanino, whose version is in the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. The museum now attributes it, tentatively, to the Genoese painter Giovanni Battista Paggi and dates it to the first decade of the 1600s. Padovanino was born in 1588, when Paggi was already in his thirties, so the borrowing may have run the other way. The museum's own catalogue entry expects its tones and light to show more clearly once the canvas has been cleaned.