In my thesis, I deal with the story of Cupid and Psyche, which was written by the Roman writer Apuleius in the second century. I am interested in how the motif was depicted and interpreted until the Renaissance period, when one of the first monumental paintings of the story was created in Villa Farnesina in Rome. The commission was carried out by Raphael and his workshop for the owner of the villa, Agostino Chigi, who had only loosely followed the chosen literary text. When analysing the selected cycle of frescoes, I was therefore interested in why Raphael only loosely followed Apuleius’s myth and how can we interpret the story depicted in this way. The first part of the thesis was thus dedicated to the development in the depiction of the myth in Greek and Roman antiquity, its preservation through the Middle Ages and its rediscovery and innovations in art in the Renaissance period. The second part of the thesis then investigates Raphael's frescoes in Villa Farnesina in detail, from basic data and iconography to a broader iconological picture, which gives us several possible interpretations of the painting.
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