Bellezza maschile -- Amore

Speranza

Cupid, as a substitute object of desire, is strongly configured as aneroticized body, albeit a rather immature one.

This is even the case in those poetic interventions which far more explicitly construct Isabella d'Este as an allegorical embodiment of chastity.

Again, this characterization of the statue’serotic power is strongly determined by the classical literary tradition in which the work of art was embedded. What the "Greek Anthology"
only hints at is made explicit in an unsavory but sensational anecdote reported by Pliny.

"To Praxiteles belongs, moreover, another Cupid, which is naked,at Parium, the colony on the Sea of Marmara, a work that matches the Venus of Cnidus in its renown, as well as in the outrageous treatment which it suffered. For Alcetas, a man from Rhodes, fell in love with it and left upon it a similar mark of his passion."