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Lot Essay
Once thievish Love the honeyed hives would rob,
When a bee stung him: soon he felt a throb
Through all his finger-tips, and, wild with pain,
Blew on his hands and stamped and jumped in vain.
To Aphroditè then he told his woe:
'How can a thing so tiny hurt one so?'
She smiled and said; 'Why thou'rt a tiny thing,
As is the bee; yet sorely thou canst sting.'
- C.S. Calverley (trans.), ‘Idyll XIX: Love Stealing Honey’, Theocritus, London, 1892, p. 110.
Cranach’s Venus and Cupid the Honey Thief beguiled the imagination of his patrons as one of his most seductive allegories. Taken from a Latin poem ‘The Honeycomb Stealer’, which had erroneously been ascribed to the Greek poet Theocritus (3rd century BC), the subject was seen as an admonition against love’s ‘sweet’ temptation. The design of the theme was first conceived by Lucas Cranach the Elder and would become one of his most successful compositions, painted by both the Elder and Younger Cranach and their workshops in at least 24 known examples (see M. J. Friedländer and J. Rosenberg, The Paintings of Lucas Cranach, New York, 1978, pp. 118-9).
Influenced by the secular spirit of the Renaissance, the elder Cranach’s search for opportunities to portray the nude resulted in what would become one of his most consequential pictorial inventions. Arriving in Wittenberg in 1505, where he became court painter to Frederick the Wise and the Saxon Electors who succeeded him, he began painting mythological subjects to cater to their humanistic leanings. Theocritus’s work was published in the original Greek at the Venetian press of Aldus Manutius in 1495⁄6, which may well have been acquired by Cranach’s employers, who sought to obtain works from the Aldine Press. The idyll attributed to the Greek poet was a particular subject of interest, with the source of Cranach’s inscription in this picture variously attributed to Ercole Strozzi, Georg Sabinus and Philip Melanchthon, who would be one of many to make Latin translations of Theocritus’s text. While the epigram elevates the composition to a moralising allegory of carnal desire, it also exudes an air of playful delectation and humanist wit, which would have appealed to court circles, with the bemused Venus asking ‘Are you, Cupid, not just like the bee, so small yet able to inflict such painful wounds?' Through these ambivalent layers of allusion, Cranach invested Classical themes with Christian virtue, comparable to the moralising elements of his paintings of The Nymph of the Spring (such as the example sold in these Rooms, 7 July 2022, lot 6), which reminded the viewer of the transitory nature of pleasure that can come with both sadness and pain.
Cranach the Elder’s first conception of the theme was borne from his seductive depictions of Venus with Cupid in as early as 1509, both in a woodcut showing the figures in a landscape and in a life-size painting set against a black background like the present (St. Petersburg, Hermitage Museum; fig. 1). Notwithstanding the vast tradition of upright nudes that populated sixteenth-century mythological paintings, Cranach’s Venus represented the artist’s first major depiction of the idealised nude that would form the core of his oeuvre. The artist introduced the moralising element to his Venus and Cupid repertoire in his Venus and Cupid the Honey Thief of circa 1526-7 (Schwerin, Staatliches Museum), with other versions of the subject including those in the Borghese Gallery, Rome (1531); the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (1530); the Musées Royaux des Beaux-arts, Brussels (1531); the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (after 1537); and the Germänisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (after 1537).
As was customary in Cranach’s process, no two treatments of the subject were the same, all showing variations in pose, detail and setting. While Cranach the Elder had few visual precedents to rely on for his own interpretation of the subject, the present Venus by Lucas the Younger is similar in design to that in Albrecht Dürer’s print of The Dream of the Doctor of circa 1498 (fig. 2), adopting the same three-quarter-angle contrapposto, outstretched arm and hand holding the diaphanous cloth around her. As with most of Cranach’s pastoral subjects, he mirrors the curves of Venus’ body in the contours of the nature around her, here reserved to the tree trunk in the absence of the characteristic forests, mountains and valleys that typically fill the backdrop. Dieter Koepplin has observed (after first-hand inspection) that the present composition is unique in its combination of the nebulous black background and the lush turf, rather than the pebble-strewn earth that adorns all the other such variants. And yet, it appears that this was not Cranach the Younger’s original intention, with hints of the original pebbled ground emerging between the blades of grass, offering an insight into the artist’s creative process and his initial conception of the composition. Cupid’s striped wings may also have been the younger Cranach’s invention, appearing in another version of the theme of around 1640 formerly in the collection of Prince Demidoff (sold at Art Rémy Le Fur & Associés, Paris, 29 November 2022, lot 30, €1,100,000).
Infrared reflectography reveals a high level of planning, with clear reserves for the figures, tree and cartellino and minor adjustments made at the painting stage, such as the enlargement of the honeycomb (Tager Stonor Richardson, 4 April 2025, available upon request). As was common practice in the Cranach workshop, the figures were first sketched with liquid, freehand underdrawing, at which stage the artist also painted bold, brushed veins in Venus’ feet and arm so that they would appear beneath the thin, economically applied glazes of the flesh. The final silhouettes were then defined with the carbon black background. This technique can be readily observed in the reflectographs of other versions by Cranach and his workshop, such as that in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg of circa 1537 (see, for example, the Cranach Digital Archive, nos. DE_GNMN_Gm213 and DE_GNMN_Gm1097).
While Cranach’s earliest depictions of Venus and Cupid are more rounded and overtly Italianate, later models such as the present have a doll-like delicacy, with exaggeratedly linear contours that appear to modern eyes as curiously abstracted rather than seductive, comparable to the mannered grace of German small-scale sculpture. With Venus’ customary jewellery and vaporous veil, she here speaks a similar language of artifice to Cranach’s ostentatious images of clothed women. Spotlit against a black backdrop, the smooth sinuousness of both Venus and Cupid, so innocently soft and fanciful, suspends the laws of nature into an artistic idiom of Cranach’s own invention, which Friedländer surmised will have ‘amused and entertained his patrons in rather the same way as the eighteenth century was amused by china dolls’ (M. J. Friedländer and J. Rosenberg, The Paintings of Lucas Cranach, New York, 1978, p.23).
We are grateful to Dieter Koepplin for proposing the attribution after first-hand inspection.
When a bee stung him: soon he felt a throb
Through all his finger-tips, and, wild with pain,
Blew on his hands and stamped and jumped in vain.
To Aphroditè then he told his woe:
'How can a thing so tiny hurt one so?'
She smiled and said; 'Why thou'rt a tiny thing,
As is the bee; yet sorely thou canst sting.'
- C.S. Calverley (trans.), ‘Idyll XIX: Love Stealing Honey’, Theocritus, London, 1892, p. 110.
Cranach’s Venus and Cupid the Honey Thief beguiled the imagination of his patrons as one of his most seductive allegories. Taken from a Latin poem ‘The Honeycomb Stealer’, which had erroneously been ascribed to the Greek poet Theocritus (3rd century BC), the subject was seen as an admonition against love’s ‘sweet’ temptation. The design of the theme was first conceived by Lucas Cranach the Elder and would become one of his most successful compositions, painted by both the Elder and Younger Cranach and their workshops in at least 24 known examples (see M. J. Friedländer and J. Rosenberg, The Paintings of Lucas Cranach, New York, 1978, pp. 118-9).
Influenced by the secular spirit of the Renaissance, the elder Cranach’s search for opportunities to portray the nude resulted in what would become one of his most consequential pictorial inventions. Arriving in Wittenberg in 1505, where he became court painter to Frederick the Wise and the Saxon Electors who succeeded him, he began painting mythological subjects to cater to their humanistic leanings. Theocritus’s work was published in the original Greek at the Venetian press of Aldus Manutius in 1495⁄6, which may well have been acquired by Cranach’s employers, who sought to obtain works from the Aldine Press. The idyll attributed to the Greek poet was a particular subject of interest, with the source of Cranach’s inscription in this picture variously attributed to Ercole Strozzi, Georg Sabinus and Philip Melanchthon, who would be one of many to make Latin translations of Theocritus’s text. While the epigram elevates the composition to a moralising allegory of carnal desire, it also exudes an air of playful delectation and humanist wit, which would have appealed to court circles, with the bemused Venus asking ‘Are you, Cupid, not just like the bee, so small yet able to inflict such painful wounds?' Through these ambivalent layers of allusion, Cranach invested Classical themes with Christian virtue, comparable to the moralising elements of his paintings of The Nymph of the Spring (such as the example sold in these Rooms, 7 July 2022, lot 6), which reminded the viewer of the transitory nature of pleasure that can come with both sadness and pain.
Cranach the Elder’s first conception of the theme was borne from his seductive depictions of Venus with Cupid in as early as 1509, both in a woodcut showing the figures in a landscape and in a life-size painting set against a black background like the present (St. Petersburg, Hermitage Museum; fig. 1). Notwithstanding the vast tradition of upright nudes that populated sixteenth-century mythological paintings, Cranach’s Venus represented the artist’s first major depiction of the idealised nude that would form the core of his oeuvre. The artist introduced the moralising element to his Venus and Cupid repertoire in his Venus and Cupid the Honey Thief of circa 1526-7 (Schwerin, Staatliches Museum), with other versions of the subject including those in the Borghese Gallery, Rome (1531); the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (1530); the Musées Royaux des Beaux-arts, Brussels (1531); the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (after 1537); and the Germänisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (after 1537).
As was customary in Cranach’s process, no two treatments of the subject were the same, all showing variations in pose, detail and setting. While Cranach the Elder had few visual precedents to rely on for his own interpretation of the subject, the present Venus by Lucas the Younger is similar in design to that in Albrecht Dürer’s print of The Dream of the Doctor of circa 1498 (fig. 2), adopting the same three-quarter-angle contrapposto, outstretched arm and hand holding the diaphanous cloth around her. As with most of Cranach’s pastoral subjects, he mirrors the curves of Venus’ body in the contours of the nature around her, here reserved to the tree trunk in the absence of the characteristic forests, mountains and valleys that typically fill the backdrop. Dieter Koepplin has observed (after first-hand inspection) that the present composition is unique in its combination of the nebulous black background and the lush turf, rather than the pebble-strewn earth that adorns all the other such variants. And yet, it appears that this was not Cranach the Younger’s original intention, with hints of the original pebbled ground emerging between the blades of grass, offering an insight into the artist’s creative process and his initial conception of the composition. Cupid’s striped wings may also have been the younger Cranach’s invention, appearing in another version of the theme of around 1640 formerly in the collection of Prince Demidoff (sold at Art Rémy Le Fur & Associés, Paris, 29 November 2022, lot 30, €1,100,000).
Infrared reflectography reveals a high level of planning, with clear reserves for the figures, tree and cartellino and minor adjustments made at the painting stage, such as the enlargement of the honeycomb (Tager Stonor Richardson, 4 April 2025, available upon request). As was common practice in the Cranach workshop, the figures were first sketched with liquid, freehand underdrawing, at which stage the artist also painted bold, brushed veins in Venus’ feet and arm so that they would appear beneath the thin, economically applied glazes of the flesh. The final silhouettes were then defined with the carbon black background. This technique can be readily observed in the reflectographs of other versions by Cranach and his workshop, such as that in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg of circa 1537 (see, for example, the Cranach Digital Archive, nos. DE_GNMN_Gm213 and DE_GNMN_Gm1097).
While Cranach’s earliest depictions of Venus and Cupid are more rounded and overtly Italianate, later models such as the present have a doll-like delicacy, with exaggeratedly linear contours that appear to modern eyes as curiously abstracted rather than seductive, comparable to the mannered grace of German small-scale sculpture. With Venus’ customary jewellery and vaporous veil, she here speaks a similar language of artifice to Cranach’s ostentatious images of clothed women. Spotlit against a black backdrop, the smooth sinuousness of both Venus and Cupid, so innocently soft and fanciful, suspends the laws of nature into an artistic idiom of Cranach’s own invention, which Friedländer surmised will have ‘amused and entertained his patrons in rather the same way as the eighteenth century was amused by china dolls’ (M. J. Friedländer and J. Rosenberg, The Paintings of Lucas Cranach, New York, 1978, p.23).
We are grateful to Dieter Koepplin for proposing the attribution after first-hand inspection.