Trajectories of Passion. The Lasting Impact of Classical Allegories of Love on Representations of Emotional Longing

The personae, poses, and visual codes of romantic love, as they are depicted in works by such diverse contemporary artists as Michelangelo Pistoletto, Cy Twombly, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Valie Export, Mel Ramos, Sigmar Polke, Ulrike Rosenbach, Lois Renner, or Elodie Pong, go back to the roots of Western culture. Drawing upon the compelling characters and rich narratives of classical antiquity first opulently featured in the dramas of love and passion painted by the Renaissance masters, artists have continued to give shape to the ephemeral notions of love through the ages in the colorful guises of the heroes and heroines of ancient mythology. Venus and Adonis, Psyche and Cupid, Perseus and Andromeda, and other iconic couples have become central figures in the representation of emotional longing, with its supreme pleasures and abysmal pitfalls.
At the same time, the complex and dangerously enticing romances of the stars of antiquity embody the dichotomies between the classical concepts of ‘heavenly’ and ‘earthly’ love, between eternal yearning and short-lived fulfillment, which were adopted and disseminated by poets and painters in the course of the Neoplatonist revival of antiquity culminating in the Renaissance–and leading to a conflation of classical mythological and Christian imagery in the spheres of art and literature, which has retained its significance over the centuries. This pivotal era will serve as the point of departure for a discussion of the evolution and durability of classical representations of love through changing times to the present.
In this context, the paper will focus on pertinent works in the State Hermitage collections by Lucas Cranach, Orazio Gentileschi, Pieter Paul Rubens, Anton Raphael Mengs, Nicolas Poussin, Antonio Canova, August Rodin, and others from the vantage point of contemporary artists who are representing the protagonists of ancient mythology in new ways, questioning, subverting, but also celebrating the classical ideals and notions of romantic love. The exploration will follow the extensive trajectories of passion ensuing from Cupid’s amorous assaults with bow and arrow anchored in the imagery of antiquity, which to this day appears to have lost none of its seductive power.