Paintings

In the heart of the ocean, where the sunlight surrenders to the dominion of the deep blue, the young fisherman feels the cold, damp touch of the syren. Her fingers slide across his skin with a deceptive, almost electric softness, while he ignores the fatal destiny looming over his head. He is lost, absolutely hypnotized by the spell of eyes that do not belong to this world. Time seems to stop in an eternal sigh as she wraps him in one last embrace; her lips, so close to his, whisper promises of love and submerged kingdoms that will never be fulfilled. In that single, fatal moment, his humanity begins to dissolve into the absolute abyss.

Hades, called Pluto by the Romans, was the god of the Greek underworld, the land of the dead in Greek and Roman mythology. While some modern religions view the underworld as hell and its ruler as the embodiment of evil, the Greeks and Romans saw the underworld as a place of inescapable darkness. Though hidden from daylight and the living, Hades himself was not evil. Instead, he was the guardian of the laws of death, a somber but rigorously just sovereign.

The story of Cupid and Psyche is, perhaps, the most beautiful allegory ever told about the human soul's journey toward immortality. The plot begins with Psyche, a king's daughter, whose beauty was so overwhelming that the people of her kingdom spoke only of her and, in doing so, forgot to follow the cult and adoration of Venus (Aphrodite), the goddess of love and beauty. The goddess, feeling outraged by this rivalry born of mortality, sends her son, Cupid (Eros), the god of desire, to punish the insolent girl.

Romanticism, which flourished approximately between the late 18th century and the mid-19th century, was not just an artistic fashion; it was a cultural revolution that encompassed literature, music, and, of course, painting. It was born as a passionate reaction against the cold logic, strict order, and rationality imposed by Neoclassicism. If the Neoclassicists sought perfection in symmetry and the rules of Greco-Roman antiquity, the Romantics sought truth in a much deeper and more turbulent place: sentiment, imagination, and uncontrollable emotion.