Venus with Cupid as a honey thief (London)

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Lucas Cranach: Venus with Cupid as a honey thief

Venus with Cupid the Honey Thief is a painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder that is kept in the collection of the National Gallery in London under inventory number NG6344. The painting is done in oil on wood and has the dimensions 81.3 × 54.6 centimeters.

Image content

The picture below shows the winged, naked Cupid , who has taken a honeycomb from the hollow trunk of the apple tree in the left center of the picture , was stung by the swarming bees and is now complaining to his also naked mother, Venus , who is standing next to him on the right . Venus wears a plumed hat and turns left to the Cupid Boy, holding onto a branch of the apple tree above her with one hand while at the same time climbing over a branch near the ground. With this pose, Venus hides her gender with her thigh, at the same time rounded buttocks and naked torso are presented advantageously. On the left in the background is a forest with forest animals, to the right the view opens onto a landscape with rugged cliffs and a castle.

On the right under the raised leg of Venus the image is marked on a stone with a winged serpent facing to the left with a ring in its mouth. The winged serpent with ring was given to Cranach on January 6, 1508 by Friedrich the Wise as heraldic animal and appears in various variations instead of a signature on numerous paintings of the Cranach circle.

The motif goes back to the poem Keriokleptes (honey thief ) from the idylls of the Greek poet Theokritos (around 270 BC), which was available in several Latin translations in the early 16th century. The poem tells of how the hungry Cupid reaches into a beehive to nibble on the honey and is attacked by the bees in the process. He then complains to his mother that small beings would cause him great pain, and his mother then reminds him that as a boy he would also cause great pain to people with his arrows. The Latin inscription used in Cranach at this painting right up in the sky as well as in other paintings of this subject paraphrased translation of the first two lines of Ercole Strozzi , for the last two lines translations come from the circle of Wittenberg humanists Philipp Melanchthon in question .

Style-critical consideration

The subject of Venus with Cupid as a honey thief is known in at least 30 versions of the Cranach circle. There are also numerous other paintings showing Venus with Cupid without honey, as well as some fragments on which only Cupid or Venus are depicted. The early depictions of Venus and Cupid in Cranach, e. B. the woodcut dated 1506, known in numerous copies, or the painting in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, dated 1509, cannot be used to date the London painting, as they differ greatly in style and motif. The earliest dated Cranach depiction of Venus with Cupid as a honey thief with a composition of motifs in a richly decorated landscape as in the London painting dates from 1527 and is in the holdings of the State Museum Schwerin , exhibited in the Güstrow Castle branch since 2012 . The authenticity of this variant, which is closely related to the London picture in terms of motif, is in part contested, but it is beyond doubt that the panel goes back to at least a Cranach original from 1527. Due to the proximity of the two representations and due to stylistic similarities with the faunal family in Los Angeles (J. Paul Getty Museum, Inv. No. 2003.100), the London picture is usually dated to shortly before 1527. The latest possible time for the execution is 1537, because in that year the Cranach signature changed to the effect that the snake wings, which had previously been erected in the London painting, were depicted lowered.

Like other subjects often dealt with by Cranach ( Adam and Eve , Lucretia , Caritas , Paris judgment ), Venus offered the opportunity to depict naked female bodies in a variety of ways, with the moralizing image content serving as a justification for the erotic image reproach. Such topics have been increasing at Cranach since the advent of the Reformation from 1520/25, when the order volume for altarpieces declined and the Cranach workshop had to look for new, private clients.

Provenance

The painting, which has been in the National Gallery since 1963, was identified as looted art in 2006 . The provenance of the picture between 1909 and 1945 is unclear. We know that the painting was owned by the Frankfurt art collector Emil Goldschmidt until 1909 and that it was auctioned off to an unknown buyer in April 1909 by Rudolph Lepke's art auction house in Berlin . In April or May 1945 it was discovered in Hermann Göring's external collection . Under dubious circumstances it came into the possession of the American journalist Patricia Lochridge Hartwell. It had been given to her by an Allied soldier , although Military Law No. 52, enacted in 1944, prohibited any transfer, whether by sale or as a gift, of works of art exceeding a value of fifty US dollars .

In 1962 Hartwell sold the picture to the New York gallery A. & E. Silberman , which in turn resold it in 1963 to the London National Gallery . The unclear provenance was discovered in the course of checking the holdings for their origin after the Washington Declaration of 1998. Since under English law there is no statute of limitations on unlawful property acquisition , it has been established beyond doubt that the museum has no property rights to the painting. But the rightful owner could not be determined.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Technical and size information according to the National Gallery's inventory database ( Memento from January 6, 2013 in the Internet Archive ).
  2. ^ Dieter Koepplin and Tilman Falk : Lukas Cranach. Paintings, drawings, prints. Stuttgart / Basel 1974/76, vol. 1, p. 238.
  3. ↑ Guido Messling (ed.): The world of Lucas Cranach (1472–1553). Catalog book, Palais des Beaux-Arts Brussels 2010, pp. 188/189.
  4. ↑ Hollstein H 105, Bartsch 115
  5. ↑ A. Nemiloff: The paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder . Ä. in the state Hermitage , in: Bildende Kunst, 1959, pp. 173–178.
  6. ↑ Kristina Hegner : Art of the Renaissance. State Museum Schwerin , Schwerin 1990, No. 7.
  7. ↑ Max J. Friedländer 1899, quoted from Dieter Koepplin and Tilman Falk: Lukas Cranach. Paintings, drawings, prints. Stuttgart / Basel 1974/76, vol. 2, p. 656.
  8. ^ Dieter Koepplin and Tilman Falk: Lukas Cranach. Paintings, drawings, prints. Stuttgart / Basel 1974/76, vol. 2, p. 600.
  9. ↑ Max J. Friedländer and Jakob Rosenberg : The paintings of Lucas Cranach , Basel and Stuttgart 1979, p. 25.
  10. ↑ Staatliche Museen Berlin - Catalog of the exhibited paintings from the 13th to 18th centuries , Berlin 1975, pp. 120/121.
  11. ↑ Johannes Erichsen : A flood of orders . In: Lucas Cranach, a painter-entrepreneur from Franconia , Augsburg 1994, p. 326.
  12. ↑ Auction catalog No. 1547: Old Master Paintings: Collection from the Emil Goldschmidt estate, Frankfurt aM ; Exhibition: Saturday, April 24, 1909 ... Monday, April 26, 1909; Auction: Tuesday, April 27, 1909.
  13. ↑ Gunnar Schnabel, Monika Tatzkow: Nazi Looted Art. Manual. Art restitution worldwide , Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-00-019368-2 , pp. 319–321.

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