Jacopo Sellaio, Florentine (c 1442-93), The Story of Cupid and Psyche, Part II. Psyche's Search for and Marriage to Cupid. A tempera painting on a wood panel, c 23 x 70 inches without its frame, from inside the lid (?) of a cassone, c 1473. In a private collection, and exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum's recent show in New York that closed in February 2009, "Love and Marriage in the Renaissance."

Working from a story originally told in Latin by the Roman writer Apuleius in his book, "The Golden Ass," as retold in the Renaissance by Boccaccio for his Italian readers, the Florentine artist Jacopo Sellaio painted this wood panel on a wedding chest (cassone) as a wedding gift for a Florentine bride and to warn her to honor and obey her husband or suffer the wrath and punishment of Venus, goddess of love and marriage.

The painting is read, as in writing, from left to right. On the left side, hovering in mid-air, Cupid once again shoots his arrows of love to inspire men and beasts to revive and repopulate the earth after it withered and died whenr Cupid refused to carry out those duties when his mother Venus laid a curse on his beloved Psyche. Like an angel before the Virgin Mary, he is shown kneeling before her in the heavens overhead, where he promises to restore the earth's fertility on which her worship depends if she will lift the curse on his beloved.

Meanwhile Psyche, who appears seven times, always wearing her white bridal dress, searches everywhere for her missing husband, until she sees that temple on the hill at left, where she bows and begs the goddess there to help her find him. The temple belongs, I think, to Ceres. a fertility goddess of crops and vegetation, rather than to Venus, who appears here three times, robed in blue.

Who or what is she doing wading knee-deep in the river? She seems not to face the farmer sowing a crop on the far bank, so perhaps she is bowig and petitioning the goddess whose statue stands in the temple with a blue dome and a blue bed or altar, perhaps not realizing that it is a a temple dedicated to Venus? One might think the lady in the blue dress and cap in the foreground to the left of Venus' temple is the goddess herself, especially since Psyche is seen kneeling before her. Or she could be the Queen, Psyche's mother; for she is dressed in the same fur cap and blue and red robes that the Queen wears in the companion painting of Psyche and Cupid falling in love on the front of this wedding chest. Like Venus, the Queen is desperate to see the earth restored, and so she seems to be pleading with her daughter to do what she has to to placate Venus, in whose direction she gazes.

In front of Venus' temple we see Psyche running or being pulled along by a woman in red. Who is she?

In the center Venus is flogging Psyche for not carrying out - or rather FOR carrying out, - a series of four impossible tasks she had assigned to her - none of them painted here by Sellaio, except perhaps the last one: Venus' demand that she get from Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, a sample of her beauty to bring back to Venus in a small cosmetic box. So Persephone may be the goddess in pink, before whom Psyche kneels to beg for a little of her beauty. But the woman in black who presents her wears a dress that was worn by one of her two sisters, whom she had murdered for tempting her to disobey her invisible lover's command never to look upon him. At any rate, after completing her four impossible tasks, at Cupid's request Psyche is led up to Olympus, to be married to him before the other gods and goddesses. And so we see Jupiter, who has given her a drink from the chalice of eternal life, now joining the couple in eternal matrimony, An appropriate scene for the wedding chest of a Renaissance bride!