The Judgement of Paris

By 1517 the taste for the classical nude had reached the Swiss cities, and Niklaus Manuel gave it grand scale here, over two metres tall, in thin tempera on cloth. The subject is the contest the Trojan prince Paris was asked to settle among three goddesses, Juno, Minerva and Venus, over which of them should keep a golden apple. Manuel gives Paris the heavy armour of a knight of his own century and lays him down asleep, while the three women stand full in the light, posed to be looked at. Beside them Mercury, the messenger who summoned the judgement, holds out the apple that would set off the Trojan War.