The Judgement of Paris

This is the beauty contest that set off the Trojan War, caught before the decision. Paris, the shepherd prince, sits at the left with his back to us, chin propped on one hand and his crook across his knee, still weighing it, his attention on Venus in the middle of the three. Minerva's weapons lie in the foreground. The Prado dates the panel to the years 1606 to 1608, the end of the eight that Rubens spent in Italy, and the Italian years are easy to see in it. The poses come out of antique statues of the kind he had been drawing in Rome, and the long winding bodies come from the Italian painting he was looking at. It is a small picture, 89 centimetres high and a little over a metre wide. The subject stayed with him: 30 years later he painted it again on a canvas nearly four metres wide, and that version hangs in the same museum. The panel is first recorded in Madrid in 1666, in the royal Alcázar.