The shepherd Paris as personification of Artistic Judgement

Van Dyck had just come home to Flanders from several years in Italy when he painted this around 1628, and the trip shows. The warm colour and the languid mood are steeped in Titian, the Venetian master he had copied obsessively. The subject is the shepherd Paris, handed the task of choosing the most beautiful of three goddesses and holding the golden apple he must award to the winner. Almost every other painter stages the three goddesses competing. Van Dyck leaves them out entirely and gives us only Paris, so lost in the beauty before him that his staff has slipped into the crook of his arm. For a long time collectors were sure the dreamy young shepherd was van Dyck's own self-portrait.