Le Jugement de Pâris

Cranach painted this Greek myth as if it had happened in Saxony. Paris, the Trojan prince asked to judge which goddess is fairest, sits here in the polished plate armour of a contemporary German knight, half asleep, while Mercury presents the three goddesses. The golden apple has become a glass orb, and the setting is a northern forest with a castle on a crag, nothing Mediterranean about it. Cranach was court painter at Wittenberg, the town where Martin Luther had launched the Reformation about a decade before, and elegant mythological nudes like this were what his workshop turned out for princely patrons alongside all the Protestant portraits and altarpieces. The goddesses wear the jewellery and piled-up hairstyles of the Saxon court.