The Judgment of Paris

The Judgment of Paris, painted by Claude Lorrain in 1645–46, sets the most famous beauty contest of antiquity in a golden riverside landscape where the three goddesses gather before the shepherd Paris, who holds the golden apple of discord. Claude, the French painter who made of the Roman campagna a paradise of luminous air, was less interested in the moral of the fable than in its light: the sun breaks through the trees to silver the water, while Juno, Venus and Minerva — and the painter’s characteristic small figures — are absorbed into an afternoon of unbroken serenity. The picture belongs to the great arcadian idylls of his maturity, in which every element, from the ruined temple to the distant sail, is composed to make the world seem endlessly benign. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.