Landscape with Psyche Outside the Palace of Cupid, or The Enchanted Castle, 1664,[1] is a painting, oil on canvas, by Claude Lorrain in the National Gallery, London. It was commissioned by Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna, a Roman aristocrat. Its subject is taken from The Golden Ass (IV-VI), by Apuleius – the love story of Psyche the soul, and Cupid the god of love. It is not clear if Psyche sits in front of Cupid's castle before she meets him, or after he has abandoned her.
The painting's popular English title, The Enchanted Castle, was first used in an engraving after the picture of 1782.[2]
The picture perhaps shows Psyche's enforced arrival in Cupid's Kingdom, when the Zephyr wafts her to 'deep valley, where she was laid in a soft grassy bed of most sweet and fragrant flowers'. After rest, she sees 'in the middest (sic) and very heart of the woods, well nigh at the fall of the river .... a princely edifice'. Lorrain's representation of Psyche is taken from an engraving by The Master of the Die that shows precisely this episode. Yet the melancholy of the picture suggests Psyche's grief after Cupid's abandonment when according to Apuleius she lamented and keened before throwing herself into the next running water where she drowned.[2]
John Keats
The English Romantic poet John Keats was fascinated by the picture. It is sometimes thought – it is disputed – to have inspired the lines – Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn, – in one of his most famous poems, "Ode to a Nightingale". There are no such doubts about another poem, called A Reminiscence of Claude's Enchanted Castle,[3] the parts of which most closely describing the painting are:
