The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche

Between 1542 and 1548 Pope Paul III transformed a series of rooms on the two upper levels of the Castel Sant’Angelo into a comfortable and at the same time impressive apartment. Time and again this castle had provided protection to popes against the incursions of secular powers, and it continued to have a military function. His predecessors had commissioned various decorations, although these have been lost. The newly decorated rooms were to provide leisure and spiritual rest - the typical purpose of a country house or villa. The mythological subjects with which some of the rooms were painted - such as the overtly erotic depictions of the story of Cupid and Psyche in the frieze of the bedchamber - thus correspond to what one would expect in a villa, but hardly in papal apartments.