Venus and Cupid as Honey Thief

Venus and Cupid as Honey Thief (1527) at Güstrow Castle is one of Cranach's more refined early treatments of the subject he would repeat throughout his career — the standing nude Venus beside an apple tree, holding a crying Cupid who has been stung by bees while stealing honeycomb. The composition's source was a poem by Theocritus, a Greek pastoral poet of the third century BCE, whose fable had been popularized by Poliziano in the fifteenth century and was well known to humanist courts. The Latin inscription typically added to such paintings translated and moralised the fable: as Cupid complains of the bee's painful sting, his mother Venus reminds him that his own arrows bring similar pain to their victims — love hurts, just as the theft of pleasure brings its punishment. Güstrow Castle in Mecklenburg, a Renaissance ducal residence, holds this among its collection of Northern European art, the castle's history as a ducal court explaining its sixteenth-century acquisition of Cranach workshop products. The figure's apple tree setting — explicit reference to Eden and the knowledge of good and evil — adds another moral dimension to the already layered iconography.

Venus's impossibly slender proportions and artificially smooth skin create Cranach's characteristic mannered ideal of beauty. The apple tree laden with fruit provides both a backdrop and a symbolic reference to the Garden of Eden and the knowledge of good and evil.