Paesaggio con Psiche davanti al palazzo di Cupido

Claude Lorrain painted this in Rome in 1664 for Lorenzo Colonna, one of the grandest aristocrats in the city, who wanted an ideal landscape steeped in old stories. The tale here comes from a Roman novel of the second century, the story of Psyche, a mortal girl, and Cupid, the god of love who has hidden her away in a palace she is forbidden to look at too closely. Claude sets her small and alone on the shore below it, at the still hour when the light is going. The English name it now carries, The Enchanted Castle, came from an engraving made more than a century later. The poet John Keats knew the picture and may have had it in mind writing of magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas.