The Met, pt. 2

I find the gallery with Rodin sculptures. Helena had suggested checking out the fallen caryatid. I’m eager to do so, especially because I’m not sure what a caryatid is exactly. Caryatid makes me think of katydid. I’m guessing though that it’s not really some kind of insect, but what would it mean to be a fallen katydid? What precisely would one have to do wrong to be a fallen katydid?

Along the way I spot Rodin’s Cupid and Psyche. It seems to depict Cupid trying to fly away and Psyche trying to hold him down. Perhaps it’s when Cupid bails on Psyche after her sisters have convinced her to shine the lamp on him while he’s sleeping, and a drop of hot oil on his shoulder wakes him up. Here’s how William Adlington translated the scene, in 1566, from The Golden Asse by Lucius Apuleius:

The god beeing burned in this sort, and perceiving that promise and faith was broken, hee fled away without utterance of any word, from the eyes and hands of his most unhappy wife. But Psyche fortuned to catch him as hee was rising by the right thigh, and held him fast as hee flew above in the aire, until such time as constrained by wearinesse shee let goe and fell downe upon the ground.

That’s not quite how it’s unfolding here.

It’s a marble sculpture, maybe 1/3 scale, or maybe Greeks and/or gods were smaller back then. They’re on a rough base, just like a rock really, except there’s also this prong coming up out to the right, on which Cupid casually kind of rests his left hand & wrist. Seems like maybe it’s a necessary structural element for the sculpture. One can see how otherwise his whole arm might snap off in a stiff wind.

The immediate effect is that he’s fleeing and she’s clinging tightly, trying to keep him from getting away. At least that’s the impression given by their relative positions to one another. But they’re not at all tensed up and fighting. Rather, they’re fairly relaxed. As mentioned, his left hand is rather casual on the prong. He’s also hiding his face under his right arm. Her face is hidden too, buried into him, under him, right up to his face. Her left arm is thrown around his torso, but her hand around his back is rather limp. And her right arm is bent double, the back of her hand resting protectively between her breasts. She’s both pulling herself toward him and defending herself from him.

And it’s his face that’s tormented. Hers is fairly serene. She seems like she’s trying to kiss him ever so delicately.

The plaque says that the sculpture is particularly “illustrating the moment of Psyche’s abandonment by Cupid owing to the machinations of Venus.” I’m not sure what moment that would be. Psyche’s whole reason for being there in the first place I suppose stems from Venus’ machinations. But this moment, when he’s fleeing? Wouldn’t that be the sisters’ machinations?

Down at the west end of the gallery I find the fallen caryatid. Two actually, bronze casts. One carrying a stone, the other an urn. Turns out a caryatid is “a sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head.” Not an insect at all! I’m in no way disappointed.

They’re not anymore serving as architectural supports, Rodin having extracted them from The Gates of Hell. But once a caryatid, always a caryatid, I suppose. The one under the stone seems a whole lot more burdened than the one with the urn. Much more tormented. And her big toe is rubbed bright, as if people sense her greater anguish and feel a need to touch her, to comfort her.

Very confusingly, the plaques for both caryatids say that they were first modeled about 1881 but that these bronze casts are from 1981. Nineteen eighty-one? A hundred years later, long after Rodin’s death? Are they still Rodins?

3 thoughts on “The Met, pt. 2

  1. The Fallen Caryatid was one of the few things I liked in RAH’s Stranger in a Strangely Long-Winded and Pedantic Land:

    “This poor little caryatid has fallen under the load. She’s a good girl–look at her face. Serious, unhappy at her failure, not blaming anyone, not even the gods…and still trying to shoulder her load, after she’s crumpled under it.

    “But she’s more than just good art denouncing bad art; she’s a symbol for every woman who ever shouldered a load too heavy. But not alone women–this symbol means every man and woman who ever sweated out life in uncomplaining fortitude until they crumpled under their loads. It’s courage…and victory.

    “Victory in defeat, there is none higher. She didn’t give up…she’s still trying to lift that stone after it has crushed her…she’s all the unsung heroes who couldn’t make it but never quit.”

    Call me a sentimentalist, but I really liked that description.

  2. Okay. You’re a sentimentalist.

    You’re also correct. It’s a pretty damned wonderful description.

    And I have to admit that, while having in fact read Stranger in a Strange Land, I remember nothing whatsoever about it. (Heck, when I think of grok I think of Asimov, for some reason.) Don’t remember a thing about The Cat Who Walked Through Walls either, except that maybe I was reading it on a trip to Asbury Park NJ once. But for some reason, maybe because I read it a bunch of times, at a much younger age, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress really stuck with me.

    Heinlein’s own religious views notwithstanding, or withstanding maybe since I don’t remember what they were, and don’t remember what if any religious themes were explored in Stranger, but “Victory in defeat, there is none higher” made me think of Christianity.

  3. Lordy, you made it through some of the wretched ones. Commend me to Heinlein’s juveniles — Farmer in the Sky, Have Spacesuit, Space Cadet — and even to Starship Troopers, but man could he have used an editor in later life. He became very quotable and almost unreadable.

    Apropros of seminal SF: I was flipping through a James Tiptree Jr. collection at Olsson’s the other night; didn’t buy it, because second-hand chronic depression is, well, depressing, but boy could she write a beautiful title. “The Women Men Don’t See,” “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” and “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever” are great, like lines from a bitter poem; “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!” is bloody amazing.

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