Vénus avec Cupidon le voleur de miel

Little Cupid has stolen a honeycomb and the bees are stinging him. Venus, wearing nothing but a vast feathered hat, seems unmoved: love, too, stings.

The story behind the painting

Cranach and his workshop made nearly 20 versions of this subject, from 1527 to 1545, which suggests it was one of his most successful compositions. The National Gallery's version is undated but has been placed around 1526 to 1527, and may be the earliest. The story comes from an idyll attributed to Theocritus, The Honeycomb Stealer, in which Cupid complains of the bee stings and Venus laughs that his own darts hurt far more. The text was first translated into German in the 1520s, and a German patron may have suggested the subject.

What to look for

On the left of an apple tree, winged Cupid holds a honeycomb, perhaps taken from a hole in the trunk, while bees attack him. On the right Venus stands naked but for a red and gold hat with a wide circle of ostrich plumes, a gold chain and a jewelled choker, holding a branch and resting a foot on another. Below her foot, a stone bears Cranach's winged serpent with a ring, granted to him in 1508. A stag and hind hide in the trees, and a fortified rock is reflected in water. The Latin verse at top right is painted straight on the sky, which suggests this is the first version; later ones put it on a white panel.

Meaning and intent

The picture is read as an allegory of the pleasures and pains of love, and perhaps a warning about venereal disease. Venus's pose and the red apples recall Cranach's paintings of Eve, linking desire, temptation and the price that follows. In the poem Venus laughs at her son: the tiny bees hurt him, yet the darts he shoots at others wound far more. The picture holds both sides of that joke, the sweetness of the stolen honey and the sting that follows. A Latin inscription on the sky spells out the moral for the viewer.

Legacy

Its history is troubling. Nothing is known of it until the 1909 sale of the Frankfurt collector Emil Goldschmidt. It may then have belonged to Hans Hermann Vogel and in 1935 to Robert Allmers, and it appears to be the Cranach photographed in Hitler's collection at Berchtesgaden. In 1945 the American war correspondent Patricia Lochridge Hartwell took it from a warehouse in southern Germany. The National Gallery bought it in 1963, and in 2006 it was identified as possibly Nazi plunder, with no known heirs.