Venus og Cupido som honningtyv

Cupid has been stealing honey and the bees have found him out. He runs to his mother, Venus, to complain that such small creatures can hurt him so much, and Venus laughs and tells him that the sting he has just felt is nothing beside the wounds his own arrows make. Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) took the scene from Theocritus’s idyll of the honey thief, and painted the moral in the plainest possible form: a nude Venus, Cupid at her side with the sting on his finger, and, on a slip of paper in the upper left corner, four lines of Latin verse — not Theocritus’s Greek but a version of it: while the boy Cupid steals the honey from the hive, a bee fixes its sting in the thief’s finger; so too the brief and fleeting pleasure we seek is mixed with sad pain and does us harm. The poem had been published under the name of Philipp Melanchthon, Luther’s colleague, and Cranach — the Reformation’s painter as much as its court painter at Wittenberg, where he made the illustrations for Luther’s Bible — signed the panel with his winged-serpent mark and the date 1530 on a large stone at the lower right. The subject exists in many versions from the workshop; this one is catalogued as no. 202 in Friedländer’s Cranach, and it came to the royal collections in 1759 with the paintings transferred from Gottorp Castle — the transfer on which the gallery’s Cranach holdings, the largest outside German-speaking countries, are built.