Genii and Amores

GENII AND AMORES. - 1. In pagan art. - The concept of the Genius, so etymologically precise in the ancient Roman religion, became altered when the Romans came into contact with Greek religion and mythology. It was no longer a question, then, of the demon who has the individual man or the individual place in his keeping, but, in dependence on its fundamental meaning, the Genius came to signify by transference personal desires and tendencies, whence the phrase genio indulgere in the sense of indulging one's own inclination or pleasure. From this derives the rapprochement with the mystic Eros (Love) with his retinue of Erotes (= Cupids), in Latin Cupido and Cupidines, conceived and depicted as little children furnished with wings to signify the mobility and fickleness of the amorous sentiment and then adopted to represent graceful genre scenes. Very well known are the Rospigliosi cupids preserved in the Museo delle Terme (Rome) and the painting of the House of the Vettii at Pompeii, where cupids are seen intent on making oil, fashioning precious objects like jewelers, selling wine. The cupids or winged genii are also introduced to animate mystagogic scenes, such as the scene of the matron's toilette in the painting of the Villa Item at Pompeii and various stuccoes of the Basilica of the Mysteries at Porta Maggiore. Nor are the so-called funerary Attis figures to be forgotten, Genii in youthful aspect, derived from the two that flank, in the Mithraic bas-reliefs, the scene of the tauroctony, depicted one with the torch raised (the rising sun), the other with the torch inverted and extinguished (the dying sun).

2. In Christian art

In paleochristian paintings, sculptures and mosaics artists frequently introduced as a decorative motif winged and unwinged genii (putti and cupids) in the most varied and graceful poses. « They are figures - writes G. B. De Rossi - in themselves indifferent, placed as complements of the composition according to the taste and custom of the classical school, from which the first artists came forth » (Bullettino di arch. crist., 1st series, 3 [1865], p. 43). Therefore they must not be considered either as Cupids or, still less, as angels. The most common scenes in which the genii appear are the rural and the marine ones: genii as vintagers or skipping among the vine leaves are seen in the vault of the hypogeum known as that of the Flavii at Domitilla (2nd century; part not reproduced by Wilpert, cf. however another fresco of the 4th century from Domitilla in Pitture, pl. 148), in a sarcophagus of the 4th century with the Good Shepherd at the center and at the sides (id., Sarcofagi, pl. 117, 4), in the porphyry sarcophagus of St. Constance and in two mosaic panels of the mausoleum of the same name (4th century); genii represented as gardeners, reapers, vine-dressers and woodcutters are represented in the scenes of the seasons (cf., for example, those frescoed in Pretestato, 3rd century: id., Pitture, pls. 32-34, and in Marcellinus and Peter [4th century], ibid., pl. 245, or else in the sarcophagi: id., Sarcofagi, pls. 69, 2, 117, 2-3); in the rural scenes they are also intent on guarding sheep (id., Pitture, pl. 31, in Domitilla, 2nd century) or on milking them (id., Sarcofagi, pl. 117, 4); in the marine scenes they ride birds, steer fragile little boats, fish with the net, with the line, with the harpoon or with the snare, dive into the water, as in the vanished mosaic of the vault of St. Constance (4th century), in the mosaic pavement of the cathedral of Aquileia (4th century), in the lower friezes of the coffers of St. John Lateran and of St. Mary Major in which Jacopo Turriti has certainly imitated classical models. Sometimes they support garlands or flowers (id., Pitture, pls. 184, 188, 211), are interspersed with orants (Crypts of Lucina end of 2nd century: ibid., pl. 25; Sts. Marcellinus and Peter, 4th century: ibid., pl. 217), are placed on flower corbels (ibid., pl. 2), occupy the center of the vault of cubicula (ibid., pls. 2, 3, 4), carry baskets (Coemeterium Maius). In the cemetery of Sts. Marcellinus and Peter a genius takes the place of the Good Shepherd (Wilpert, Pitture, pl. 217). In the sarcophagi they support the imagines clypeatae (id., Sarcofagi, for example, pls. 11, 4, 32, 3, 37, etc.), and very often the cartouches for inscriptions (ibid., for example, pls. 11, 4, 14, 3, 128, 1, etc. also in the Pitture, pl. 218). Two genii assist at a cockfight, the winning cock has near him the genius with the palm, while the defeated one has the weeping genius (id., Sarcofagi, pl. 156). In certain Christian sarcophagi is found the Genius of death with the inverted torch, of purely pagan flavor (ibid., pls. 68, 6, 71, 4, 76, 2, 132, 1). In the gilded glasses the Genii often crown the figures represented there. For the depictions of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, where genii are also often found, v. AMORE e PSICHE.

The ornamental motif of the genii tends to disappear in the art of the early and late Middle Ages except in rare cases, as in the sculpture of Wiligelmo on the facade of the cathedral of Modena (12th century), to reappear frequently again in the painting and sculpture of the Renaissance and then in the Baroque and the modern. - See pl. I.

Pietro Frutaz