Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553)
NG 6344 
Cupid complaining to Venus

Susan Foister, 2024

Extracted from:
Susan Foister; with Rachel Billinge, Marika Spring and Lea Viehweger; and contributions by Lorne Campbell and Allison Goudie, The German Paintings before 1800 (London: National Gallery Global and Yale University Press, 2024).

1526–7

Oil originally on wood, transferred to Masonite board with mahogany veneer, 82.1 × 55.8 cm

Signature and Inscription

Signed with Cranach’s serpent insignia facing left with elevated wings on stone below the left foot of Venus.

Inscribed: DVM PVER ALVEO[LO] F[VRATUR ME]LLA CUPIDO / FURANTI DIGITVM CV[SPIDE] F[IXIT] APIS / SIC ETIAM NOBIS BREVIS ET [PERI]TVRA VOLUPTAS / QUAM PETIMUS TRI[S]T[I] [M]IXTA DOLORE N[O]CET (‘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 / is mingled with sadness and brings us pain’).

Provenance

The picture is first recorded in the sale of the collection of Emil Goldschmidt (1848–1909), Frankfurt, at Rudolph Lepke, Berlin, on 27 April 1909, lot 48, clearly identified through the photograph in the sale catalogue.¹ The purchaser at the 1909 sale was an art dealer who has not been identified.²

This may be the painting by Lucas Cranach of ‘Venus und Amor als Honigdieb’, of similar but not identical dimensions, that was recorded as being sold by the widow of the Chemnitz businessman Hans Hermann Vogel (1867–after 1931) through Heinemann in Munich on 12 September 1935 to ‘Allmer, Berlin’. The latter can possibly be identified as Robert Allmers (1872–1951), president of the German Automobile Industry Association.³ It was acquired by Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) at an unknown date and is recorded in a photograph in an album that includes works from his private collection displayed at the Berghof, Berchtesgarten, Obersalzberg (fig. 1).⁴ Hitler was said in 1947 to have had a painting by Cranach of ‘Venus and Amor’ in the flat in Munich in which he lived from 1929 onwards.⁵ The painting may have been the work acquired by him in or before 1937, when he is said to have owned a recently acquired but unspecified work by Cranach.⁶ It may be the painting by Cranach that he is said to have acquired with royalties from the sales of Mein Kampf.⁷

The painting was owned from 1945 by Mrs Patricia Lochridge Hartwell (1916–1998), an American war correspondent who was permitted to select it from a warehouse controlled by American forces in southern Germany in 1945.⁸ Mrs Hartwell sold it in 1963 through E. & A. Silberman, New York; according to Silberman it was sold ‘by family descendents’ of the purchasers at the 1909 sale (see above).⁹ It was bought by the National Gallery from Silberman in 1963.

Versions¹⁰

• (1) Schwerin, Museum Schloss Güstrow, 1527. Beech, 83 × 58.2 cm (fig. 2).

• (2) London, National Gallery, NG 6680, 1529.¹¹

• (3) Copenhagen, Statens Museum, 1530. Oil on panel, 58 × 38 cm (fig. 3).

• (4) Switzerland, private collection (formerly Weimar), 1530.¹²

• (5) Formerly with Frederick Mount, New York, about 1530.¹³

• (6) Exported, formerly private collection, UK, 1530.¹⁴

• (7) Private collection, New York, 1531.¹⁵

• (8) Rome, Galleria Borghese, 1531. Wood, 169 × 67 cm.¹⁶

• (9) Brussels, Musée des Beaux‐Arts, 1531. Transferred to canvas, 176 × 80 cm.

• (10) London, private collection, 1532. Wood, 52.5 × 37 cm.¹⁷

• (11) Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie, 1532, fragment with Cupid only. Beech, 18.7 × 12.8 cm.

• (12) Kronach, Fränkische Galerie, 1534. 49.5 × 34 cm.¹⁸

• (13) London, Bonhams, 4 December 2013, lot 60, dated 1537.

• (14) Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, about 1537 (with landscape). Limewood, 50.1 × 34.4 cm.

• (15) Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, post‐1537. Limewood, 175.4 × 66.3 cm.

• (16) Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, post‐1537. 174 × 64.9 cm.

• (17) Otterlo, Kröller‐Müller Museum, post‐1537. Limewood, 174 × 66.5 cm.

• (18) Formerly New York Historical Society, sold Sotheby’s, New York, 12 January 1995, lot 151, about 1540.

• (19) Private collection, about 1540. Limewood, 51 × 34 cm.¹⁹

Technical Notes

The painting was transferred to Masonite board in June 1962 by Thorp Brothers of New York.²⁰ It was cleaned and restored in July 1963 at the National Gallery. The paint is in good condition: there are some losses of paint in vertical lines extending inwards from the top and bottom edges, and slightly broader areas of damage around Venus’ right ankle and in patches along a vertical line above this, behind her body, across her left arm and above her hat.

The current support is Masonite, which has been veneered and cradled to look like an old panel. The pattern of paint loss visible in a photograph taken after cleaning but before restoration in 1963 suggests that the original support was a wood panel with vertical grain, and with a vertical join just to the right of Venus’ body, extending through her raised arm and her leg; there was also a split or join to the left of Venus’ head, in the tree.

The ground is chalk (calcium carbonate) bound with animal glue. A fine canvas is present beneath the ground but this has been identified as cotton and was presumably added as part of the transfer process.²¹ Paint samples taken in 1963 showed that there is a lead white priming on top of the ground. Nothing that could definitely be identified as black underdrawing could be found with infrared reflectography. Examination of the surface with a microscope, however, revealed lines of red pigment below the uppermost layers of paint. These red lines appear to be performing the role of underdrawing and must lie over the priming. It has not been possible to identify the red material used, but it appears to be in a liquid medium. The lines can only be seen where the paint over them is pale in colour and thinly applied. They have been found in the hat, along several contours of the figures and in the landscape (figs 4, 5).

Linseed oil was identified as the paint binder by GC analysis of three samples: mid‐blue paint from the sky, green from a leaf on the tree and creamy white paint from the clouds. There was no indication of heat‐prepolymerisation of the medium.

The blue sky is painted in two layers of azurite mixed with a little lead white, the blue pigment being more finely ground in the lower layer. Cross‐sections show that in some places the leaves of the apple tree have a black underpaint; they [page 185] are modelled with an opaque yellow‐green paint consisting of lead‐tin yellow and verdigris in the lighter areas, and a darker green of verdigris alone in the shadows. The apples are painted with a mixture of lead white with some red lake and vermilion, glazed with red lake in the rosiest parts; the yellow highlights are of lead‐tin yellow. The apples have reserves but many of the leaves are painted over the sky (fig. 6). A cross‐section of paint from an apple showed a very thin scattering of carbon black particles over the lead white priming and under the layer of pink: on the painting, under magnification, this can be seen to be a very thin black underpainting, as though a very little paint has been dragged over the surface. There are numerous small changes, with the black underpainting for leaves or parts of leaves being painted out with blue sky paint. Similar thin layers of black are present under the small mountain and the grass in the middle distance.

Subject

Venus and Cupid are shown against a lavish and beautiful landscape background. On the left is a forest with a stag and a hind. On the right is a distant landscape with a castle on a high crag overlooking water, in which other buildings are reflected. Between Venus and Cupid is an apple tree hung with fruit. Cupid holds a honeycomb and bees, which appear to have flown out of a large hole in the base of the tree trunk, [page 186] crawl over him. Venus holds a branch of the tree with her left hand, and raises her left foot over a lower branch. She is naked except for her two necklaces, a thick golden chain and a bejewelled choker, and a large hat, a confection of coloured ostrich plumes on red velvet worn over a cloth‐of‐gold cap which conceals her hair. A Latin inscription is placed top right, directly over the blue of the sky (fig. 7). This is the most elaborate of a number of versions of this subject painted by Cranach and his workshop (see Versions). No two are exactly alike, but the inscription here is generally to be found in the same form in all.

The Inscription and the Origins of the Subject

The subject is based on lines from Idyll XIX, ‘The Honeycomb Stealer’, attributed to the third‐century‐BC Greek poet Theocritus.²² The poem tells how Cupid complained to Venus of being stung on his fingers by bees after he had stolen a honeycomb. He blew on his hand, stamped and danced about, asking how such a small creature could give him such a large wound. Venus, laughing, told him that the effect was very similar to the wounds that he himself, also a small creature, imparted (in other words, the pains of love experienced by those who had been pierced by Cupid’s arrows). The work of Theocritus was published in the original Greek by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1495/6; this edition may well have been acquired by Cranach’s employers, the electors of Saxony, who sought to obtain works from the Aldine press.²³ A very similar treatment of the theme also occurs in another ancient Greek poem by Anacreon, Ode 35 (Carmina xl).

Theocritus’s poem was the subject of interest among humanists in Wittenberg, the principal seat of the electors of Saxony. A number of them, including Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560), Professor of Greek at the University of Wittenberg, the Hungarian humanist Caspar Ursinus Velius (1493–1539), Eoban Hess of Erfurt (1488–1540), Joachim Camerarius the Elder (1500–1574), Jakob Moltzer (1503–1558) and Johann Stigel (1515–1562), made Latin translations of the text. The Latin translation of Theocritus by Velius was published in Basel in 1522 in Fünf Bücher Gedichte. Five versions of Idyll XIX by Melanchthon and his fellow humanists were published in Joannes Soter, Epigrammata Graeca veterum, in Cologne in 1528.²⁴ Hess published a further four versions in an edition of Theocritus produced at Hagenau in 1530.²⁵ Melanchthon, who lectured on Theocritus at the university, may well have initiated these translations, and Bauch was the first to suggest that Cranach’s knowledge of the subject might have derived from him.²⁶ The version of the idyll by Melanchthon published in 1528 is not similar to Cranach’s text; however, an epigram by him based on Theocritus published in 1540 is closer to the second two lines of Cranach’s text: ‘Pungit Apis puerum Veneris dum dulcia mella/ Furatur: sic sunt dulcia mixta malis’.²⁷

An epigram by Georg Sabinus (1508–1560), which is identical to the lines in the painting, was evidently the source of Cranach’s inscription: it was first published in 1536 at Wittenberg by Georg Rhau (1488–1548), in an edition of his Enchiridion Utriusque Musicae Practicae, and again in 1538 along with a woodcut illustrating the subject.²⁸ The epigram was also included in Sabinus’s Poemata published in Leipzig in 1544.²⁹ Sabinus was a youthful member of Melanchthon’s circle who became his son‐in‐law: he arrived at the University of Wittenberg in 1523 or 1524, lodged in Melanchthon’s house and married his daughter in 1536.³⁰ He would have been nineteen in 1527, the year the first dated version of Cranach’s painting was produced (see Versions, above and Date, below). Sabinus’s epigram is accompanied in the 1538 publication by a two‐line variant of the Theocritus subject by Melanchthon, which is identical but for one word with Melanchthon’s epigram published in 1540 referred to above.³¹ Woodcuts (neither attributable to Cranach) which accompany both epigrams show, in relation to the Melanchthon text, a winged Venus holding from a blindfolded Cupid a heart which has been pierced by an arrow; and in relation to the Sabinus text, a Cupid‐like infant Christ holding the instruments of the Passion (fig. 8).³² Perez d’Ors has drawn attention to a letter of 2 June 1526 in which Melanchthon signalled his interest in making versions of poems by Theocritus. As he has argued, it is highly probable that it was Melanchthon himself who was responsible for initiating not only the several textual variants [page 187]of the subject which he, his son‐in‐law and their humanist colleagues at the University of Wittenberg produced in the 1520s, but also Cranach’s visual response to the subject in paintings which incorporated the Sabinus text. Both paintings and poems are likely to have been first produced at the same period (see Date, below).³³ Evidence survives that the Wittenberg humanist circle around Melanchthon knew of Cranach’s composition: Eoban Hess, the Erfurt humanist, a correspondent of Luther’s and also a member of Melanchthon’s circle, wrote at an unknown date in his copy of Velius’s 1522 translation of Theocritus against the relevant idyll: ‘Tabella Luce’ (‘the painting by Lucas [Cranach]’).³⁴

Visual Models and Precedents

Cranach had few, if any, visual precedents to rely on for his own development of a pictorial response to the subject of the Theocritus idyll. Dürer depicted the subject in a watercolour now at Vienna of 1514 and a slightly later woodcut is attributed to him (dated to around 1526 by Dodgson), but Cranach’s version of the subject owes nothing to these. Dürer’s Venus is in both cases clad in a flowing robe, and in the 1514 drawing bees pour out of beehives; in the woodcut they emerge from a hole in a post.³⁵ Alciati’s Emblemata of 1531 includes two Latin epigrams based on the theme of Cupid the Honey Thief and has woodcut illustrations, but the book was published after the first dated versions of Cranach’s subject.³⁶ Holbein alluded to the subject in a small roundel sketch for a medallion or badge, showing Cupid and the beehive; the drawing appears to date from between 1532 and 1543.³⁷

Cranach’s response to the Latin lines inspired by Theocritus is distinguished by its upright format, unlike Dürer’s compositions, and by the near nudity of the goddess.³⁸ Both features follow closely Cranach’s early representation of Venus in the woodcut of 1509 and in the painting at St Petersburg of the same date. The pose of Venus’ arm in the National Gallery work refers to the woodcut of Adam and Eve from 1509 (fig. 9). The elegant bend of her left leg may have been inspired by the intersecting bent leg of Adam in the woodcut, the boundaries between the two figures removed. The tantalising manner in which she grasps the branch loaded with ripe fruit is perhaps a deliberate and purposeful reference to the temptress Eve.³⁹ The pleasures of the painting are to be found in combined enjoyment of the amusing subject matter and the moral of the verses, in the elegance of the nude with her sweepingly decorative hat, in the beauty of the beasts lurking in the darkness of the forest and in the contrast of the precisely described distant vistas, themselves reflected in the lake. The way in which Cranach interprets the subject here, making Venus turn to the viewer, sharing the moral, with her left eye exactly in the centre of the composition, brings text and image together with witty precision. Cranach’s visual response to the texts produced in Melanchthon’s humanist circle is suitably inventive and distinctive.⁴⁰ As the 1538 publication of the painting’s text suggests, it may, however, have been intended to convey a more profound, less secular meaning in the context of the Lutheran circles in which Cranach moved, in which Christ’s sacrifice was understood to have liberated man from the selfish suffering represented by Cupid (fig. 8).⁴¹

Attribution and Date

This painting has been compared to others by Cranach of outstanding quality which can be dated to the mid‐1520s.⁴² It is distinguished not only by the inventiveness and wit of the composition, but also by passages of painting of great beauty: the landscape with its crystalline reflections in the mountain lake, the ostrich‐feather‐trimmed hat worn by Venus (fig. 10) and the deer in the background (fig. 11). The finely detailed depiction of such areas contrasts with the bolder, more stylised but vigorous rendering of the foliage, which acts as a foil to the figure of the goddess. It is one of numerous versions of the theme by Cranach and his workshop, which vary greatly in size and quality: many are almost half the size of this painting, some much larger, and some have dark backgrounds rather than landscape settings (see Versions). NG 6344 is distinct in several ways. It uses a larger format (but not the life‐size format first seen in the version in the Galleria Borghese, Rome, which has a dark background and is dated 1531). Only the painting at Schwerin, with a date that can be read as 1527, is close in size to this one.⁴³ Here the Latin verses appear on [page [188]] [page 189] the upper right and are inscribed directly over the background rather than on the white rectangle found in other versions: none of these bears their verses on the right‐hand side except the Rome painting of 1531 (which, like the other very large‐scale versions, has a narrow format) and the Nuremberg picture, later in date; these, however, present the verses on a tablet, unlike the National Gallery picture. It is also distinctive in including a deer and a stag on the left‐hand side: of other versions; the Schwerin painting includes a deer family on the right, while some others include a stag on the right. The stag may be derived from drawings used in Cranach’s workshop, but no specific source in a drawing can be identified and none is dated.⁴⁴

NG 6344 was dated to around 1530 on acquisition by the National Gallery in 1963, but Koepplin and Falk suggested that it could be dated to as early as 1526, by comparison with the dated painting of Adam and Eve of that year (Courtauld Institute); not only do both paintings include apple trees and deer, but Eve raises her arm in a very similar manner to Venus.⁴⁵ Koepplin and Falk also compared the National Gallery work to a painting of wild people (now Getty Museum), which they suggested might be a pendant to the Apollo and Diana in the Royal Collection, also datable on stylistic grounds to the mid‐1520s; again, there are similarities in the treatment of the landscape. The rocky crag, the buildings reflected in water, the thick curtain of leaves and the stag’s head are all closely comparable to NG 6344; it is possible that these paintings were conceived and painted during the same period.⁴⁶

The composition of NG 6344 is close to the earliest dated versions of the subject. The picture in Schwerin of 1527 (fig. 2) is similar in size and general composition, but differs in that Cupid is shown more frontally and the mountain is shown to the left. The painting dated 1530 at Copenhagen (fig. 3), which is of very high quality and in very good condition, is also similar to the National Gallery work, though Venus does not wear a broad‐brimmed hat. NG 6344 is closely comparable stylistically to the 1526 Adam and Eve. The one distinctive feature which is not followed in other versions – the absence of a white background for the inscription, which must have made other versions more legible – argues strongly that it may have been Cranach’s earliest response to the attractive subject provided by the Lutheran humanist circle at Wittenberg. It probably dates from about 1526–7, as Koepplin and Falk first suggested. The number of extant versions suggests that it proved to be a highly commercial subject for Cranach and his workshop.

Select Bibliography

Koepplin and Falk 1974, vol. 2, p. 600, no. 500; Friedländer and Rosenberg 1978, no. 246.

Notes