CIRCA 2ND CENTURY A.D.

Depicted as a paunchy nude boy with a fleshy torso and pudgy legs, standing with his weight on his left leg, the right leg slightly advanced, the heel lifted, leaning against a tree-trunk support, his arms held out to the sides, perhaps once holding a down-turned torch, his head turned to his right, the eyes articulated and gazing to his right, smiling, with a double chin, dimpled below the lip, his full hair arranged in a top-knot and central plait and falling in thick individual curls to his shoulders, his wings outstretched from his shoulder blades, the feathers indicated on the interior and exterior, on an integral oval socle plinth, profiled on two sides, perhaps indicating placement in a niche or beside another statue.

Eros (in Latin, Cupid), the god of love, was the son of Aphrodite. His primary characteristics were his wings and his youth. From the late 4th century B.C. onward, artists most often characterized Eros as a baby. In the Greek world, babyhood was the time when a boy was most closely associated with his mother, before being sent off to the gymnasium. Eros was the executor of his mother's commands, piercing or inflaming those she designated with the pains of desire. The capricious way that Love struck also suggested that amorous attraction was governed by the random, unreasoning impulses of a child.