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Lot Essay
According to Lucius Apuleius (The Golden Ass, Books 4-6), Venus, angered by the adulation that Psyche's beauty inspired, ordered her winged son Cupid to assist her in a plot to take vengeance on the princess: she commanded Cupid to inflame Psyche with 'wretched love for the most miserable creature living.’ Here, Bartolomeo Guidobono illustrates the episode of Psyche coming to Cupid at night. She holds the handle of an oil lamp and leans toward his partially uncovered body to inspect him as he sleeps.
After an apprenticeship with his father, a maiolica painter, Bartolomeo Guidobono and his brother Domenico turned their attention to fresco painting in their native Savona. Bartolomeo later travelled to Parma, Venice and possibly Bologna, where he was influenced by the works of Parmigianino and Correggio, assimilating their elegant tonality, soft modelling and graceful facial types. Guidobono also absorbed the innovations of earlier Genoese painters, like Valerio Castello and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, as seen in his dark interiors contrasted with bright flashes of color and localized highlights. The present painting is roughly contemporary with two large canvases, Jael and Sisera and Samson and Delilah (Zerbone Collection, Genoa), in which the figures are bathed in a similarly strong light against a dark ground. These paintings have been dated to around 1690, around the time when Guidobono frescoed the Galleria di Venere e Adone in the Palazzo Cambiaso-Centurione in Genoa.
After an apprenticeship with his father, a maiolica painter, Bartolomeo Guidobono and his brother Domenico turned their attention to fresco painting in their native Savona. Bartolomeo later travelled to Parma, Venice and possibly Bologna, where he was influenced by the works of Parmigianino and Correggio, assimilating their elegant tonality, soft modelling and graceful facial types. Guidobono also absorbed the innovations of earlier Genoese painters, like Valerio Castello and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, as seen in his dark interiors contrasted with bright flashes of color and localized highlights. The present painting is roughly contemporary with two large canvases, Jael and Sisera and Samson and Delilah (Zerbone Collection, Genoa), in which the figures are bathed in a similarly strong light against a dark ground. These paintings have been dated to around 1690, around the time when Guidobono frescoed the Galleria di Venere e Adone in the Palazzo Cambiaso-Centurione in Genoa.