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| Lucas Cranach the Elder, Cupid Complaining to Venus, 1526-7, oil on panel, NG |
The
subjects of paintings fascinate me: I always want to know what is going on, who
the people are, where they are and why
they are. I want to know why the work was made, whom for and whom by. Paintings
make me want to ask questions, and the finding out of the answers is one of the
things I enjoy most about art.
Take
this painting for example. What on earth
is going on here? In the background on
the right there is a craggy hill topped by a castle and with a lake beneath
whilst on the left, wild deer peer out from a dark forest. This landscape may
be imaginary, but the artist, Lucas Cranach the Elder, often depicted places he
knew or that belonged to his patrons in Saxony [1].
In the foreground and dominating the scene, a beautiful and, for this period,
unusually slim, lady stands next to a tree, while a small boy looks up at her
and swats bees. The lady is wearing a
magnificent hat and intricate necklace, but absolutely nothing else and the
little boy is sporting a pair of wings. A
curious and intriguing image…there must be a story behind it!
And
there is. The lady is Venus, goddess of
love, and the boy is her son, Cupid. Cupid has just stolen a honeycomb from a
hole in the tree and the angry bees have stung him. His expression of pain and bewilderment is
clearly depicted by Cranach in the furrowed eyebrows and parted mouth. Cupid asks his mother how something so small,
such as a bee, could cause so much pain, and Venus answers, that it is similar
to the wounds inflicted by Cupid’s own arrows of love [2]. We know that this is the theme of the
painting due to a Latin inscription in the sky at the top right:
Young
Cupid was stealing honey from a hive when a bee stung the thief on the
finger. So it is for us: the brief and
fleeting pleasure we seek comes mixed with wretched pain to do us harm [3].
The
original idea was written in Greek, by the third century BC poet Theocritus and
Lucas Cranach may have been introduced to the text by the German humanist
Melancthon [4].
The poem, Idyll number nineteen, is very short:
When the thievish
Love one day was stealing honeycomb from the hive, a wicked bee stung him, and
made all his finger-tips to smart. In
pain and grief he blew on his hand and stamped and leapt upon the ground and
went and showed his hurt to Aphrodite, and made complaint that so little a
beast as a bee could make so great a wound.
Whereat his mother laughing, ‘What?’ cries she, ‘art not a match for a
bee, and thou so little and yet able to make wounds so great?’ [5]
Cranach
entitled his work, Cupid Complaining to
Venus and I think he has fully captured that moment, both in Cupid’s pained
and surprised expression as in the amused, almost sly look of Venus which is
completely lacking in compassion. She
does not even look at her son, but directly out at the viewer.
This
work was exhibited in the National Gallery’s recent Strange Beauty Exhibition, but the Gallery holds this work and it can
normally be viewed, so do go and take a look.
Alison Barker
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