Marie Antoinette was not the only person in the eighteenth century to delight in costuming herself in antique garb and playing at mythology: painters like Jean-Honore Fragonard painted fete gallants where lords and ladies frolicked with Psyche and Cupid while embarking for Cytheria, and poets like Johann Uz wrote poems like "Die Liebesgotter" that sported with Amaryllis in the shade of the bower of bliss. Nor was the Schubert in 1816 immune to the allure of the antique and in his setting of Uz's "Die Liebesgotter" (The Gods of Love) (D. 446), he wrote a sprightly hymn to the ancient gods of love in the form of a tenderly gallant gavotte. And, realizing with Wilde that "brevity is the soul of wit," Schubert's song frisks through Uz's two verses in less than two minutes, with a light and supple melody and a caressing piano accompaniment that incarnates Uz's blondes and brunettes in music of soft curves and laughing cadences. The dainty piano postlude is the frame on the painting.

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