Vénus et Cupidon au rayon de miel

Cupid has raided a beehive and the bees have caught him. He holds up the dripping honeycomb and cries to his mother, Venus, who stands nude and unbothered beside him. The Latin lines painted in the corner spell out the joke and its lesson. The little thief howls over a few stings, yet the wounds his own arrows deal to lovers hurt far longer. The story comes from an ancient Greek poem by Theocritus. Cranach painted it around 1531 in Wittenberg, the town at the heart of Martin Luther's Reformation, where he ran a large workshop and was Luther's close friend and godfather to one of his children. The same shop that turned out these slim, teasing nudes for German princes was also printing portraits of Luther and images for the new Protestant cause.