EN
The life-size and artistically high-quality marble group depicting Cupid and Psyche is exhibited at the foot of the main staircase in the New Hermitage. The theme, drawn from Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, was particularly popular at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. According to the author a plaster model of Cupid and Psyche was created by Domenico Cardelli, but he never had the opportunity to sculpt the full-scale work in marble, which was completed by the husband of the dead sculptor’s sister, Pietro Marchetti. Cupid and Psyche had been purchased in Rome in 1804 by Valerian Stroynovski, Senator of the pre-partition Polish Kingdom. His widowed wife remarried in 1835 to general Elpidifor Zurov who sold Cupid and Psyche as a ‘Canova sculpture’ to the Hermitage for 5,000 roubles.