Detail of The Abduction of Jill Psyche by CyberCorn-Entropic on DeviantArt. Click for full image (800px × 1 219px).
Marvin Fuller, operating as CyberCorn-Entropic on DeviantArt created his characters Joe Cupid and Jill Psyche as early as in 1992. He used these “Furry Incarnations of Love and the Soul” as wedding anniversary cards for his parents for many years.
The version shown above, created in 2005, and based on William Bouguereau’s 1895 work Le Ravissement de Psyche (The Rapture of Psyche) was the first in which the two characters wear (virtually) nothing. In the artist’s own words:
“As for why Cupid is a bunny, it should be noted that an old Chinese god of love lived on the Moon where he tied the cords of future lovers’ lives together. Continuing that line of thought, many cultures, including the Chinese, have seen a rabbit shape on the Moon.
The bird wings are, of course, classic Renaissance Cupid. Psyche’s wings naturally derive from the Greek word for butterfly, which is the same as that for the soul. I chose the wings of a Plain Tiger (Danaus chrysippus), a butterfly native to the Mediterranean, because of their colorfulness. Her form as a wildcat comes from a mistake I made when reading about Egyptian ideas on the soul.”
Below you can see Bouguereau’s original painting and the remastered version side by side. Click the first to visit the gallery where you will find dozens more contemporary versions of Bouguereau’s work. Click the second to view The Abduction of Jill Psyche on DeviantArt.
In case anyone is curious on why they’re called Incarnations instead of God and Goddess, it’s a tip of the hat to Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality series of novels. His Incarnations were basically mortals who worked as various aspects of existence. The major ones were Death, Time, Fate, War, Nature, Evil, Good, and Night.
On another note, this is an excellent site. Looking through all the pictures is fun.