Sleeping Cupid (Eros)

This sculpture adorned a Roman garden or fountain, or possibly a child’s grave. Cupid (“Desire”), the Greek Eros, god of love, is represented as a young boy asleep on a rock covered with Herakles’s lion skin, his wings behind his back. The image of Cupid sweetly slumbering on the trophy of Greece’s famous action hero is both incongruent and charming. But the appearance of innocence is deceptive. One imagines that Herakles has abandoned his lion skin for an amorous adventure instigated by Cupid, who rests with his bow and arrows after overcoming the great hero. The sculpture is a monument to the power of love. The lighthearted motif goes back to the Hellenistic period (323–30 BCE). Hellenistic sculpture, followed by Roman, explored a great variety of subjects, from portraits of rulers to dynamic narrative groups, from philosophers to Dionysiac frolicking, and from bathing Aphrodite to the physically deformed.