Dali House

The 1600 version of “The Judgement of Paris” by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), which was based on Raphael’s. Rubens did at least three variations, but we’ll get to that.

And the Internet always tosses up three different renditions of Salvador Dali’s “Judgement of Paris”, and I’m not sure they’re all correct. He did his etching in the mid-1960s for a series called “Mythologie”. Have a look at this post for a bit more information on the subject.

Hacking into the legend of the Trojan War and all the paint that’s been poured into recording the event that started it.

The riveting soap opera played out in and around the myth that has for 3,000 years been known as “the Judgement of Paris” has for just as long had artists falling all over each other to get their versions down on canvas. Of course, all of Greek mythology has been painted as many times as Tom Sawyer’s picket fence, including the whole Trojan War ball of yarn back to front, but consider this particular episode:

* Three of history’s most beautiful women practically or altogether nude, and each aquiver with naked jealousy
* A guy — Joe Average — called upon to be the judge in their divine beauty pageant
* God the Father watching with keen interest
* And the fate of human civilisation teetering in the balance.

Who could resist subject matter like this? No one!

The Judgement in porcelain, from about 500 BCE, at Rome’s Capitoline Museums.

For centuries it was the ancient Greek and Roman scribes who had their way with the tale, complete with ribald humour, while the pot-painters of their time fumbled with the essentials. Finally, though, the more modern artists who knew how to depict lust properly got their chance and set up their easels on Mount Ida, where Paris was tending his sheep, an odd thing for him to be doing, since he was a prince of Troy.

Paris must have wondered why he was suddenly the designated model for an art class, but then he had had his moment of fame: He’d been the adjudicator in a bullfight — his own bull against a bovine who turned out to be Ares (not Taurus). Ares, to no one’s surprise, won.

Raphael’s “Judgement of Paris” is in fact the engraving made from it in 1515 by Marcantonio Raimondi. Somebody lost Raphael’s copy. Not to worry, Marcantonio (c1480-c1534) was one of the best in the printmaking business, influenced by Dürer and exceedingly clever at adding in his own backdrops.

In this detail, viewers take note of a character who’s taking note of them. This is where Édouard Manet found his tableau for “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” in 1863. Raphael or not, polite people at the Paris Salon freaked when they saw a naked female picnicking with a couple of swank “customers”. So Manet borrowed instead from Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” and painted “Olympia”, and you should have heard the howling then!

The reason for the impromptu painters’ salon in the Phrygian highlands began to dawn on Paris when Hermes, the messenger boy, turned up with three quite fetching ladies. The painter-paparazzi must have had advance notice of their coming, Paris thought.

Hermes was carrying an apple, never a good sign in these scenarios, Paris thought further, and then he stopped thinking because the women had shed their clothes and begun bathing in the Spring of Ida. Hermes would have explained to him, if he could have held his attention long enough, that he was holding the Apple of Discord, which Eris, the Goddess of Discord, had chucked onto the banquet table at a party that she’d crashed.

Girolamo Benvenuto (1470-1524), with all the gilded, not-quite-natural nature of the Sienese artisans in his day.

The banquet was another scene of which there are dozens of great paintings: a wedding party that Zeus had thrown for Peleus and Thetis, who would one day give birth to Achilles, who would one day be played by Brad Pitt in a blockbuster film that would be quickly forgotten because it didn’t have much going for it beyond a couple of pretty good swordfights.

Eris wasn’t invited because she was, well, the Goddess of Discord, and who wants discord at a party? Disco, maybe, in a pinch, but not discord. She showed up anyway and, staying in character, caused discord. The golden apple she added to the buffet, she said, without naming names, belonged to the best-looking woman in the universe.

“Why, that would be me!” said the goddess Hera, the Goddess of Marriage and also of Cuckolded Wives, who was wedded to (and cuckolded by) Zeus.

“No, me!” said the goddess Athena, who enjoyed a good hunt.

“In your dreams,” said the goddess Aphrodite, who was, after all, the Goddess of Beauty. “It’s me!”

All eyes turned to Zeus, the capo del tutti capo of Mount Olympus, who, like most chairmen of the board, was all bluff and bluster. He passed the buck and nominated Paris, the cattle judge, to decide which babe was the best looking.

The scene as seen by Juan de Juanes, born Juan Macip and later known elsewhere as Joan de Joanes (c 1510-79), who came out from his father’s shadow to guide Spain into the Renaissance.

In the comical Carry On, Miss Congeniality version of the saga written in the second century by the Syrian Greek Lucian, Paris is descended upon and feigns shyness about choosing a victor, but he soon warms to the idea. The girls don’t disrobe to bathe but do so at his request so he can be “thorough” in his examination, as it were. Athena complains that Aphrodite has left her “magic girdle” on and Aphrodite points out that Athena is still wearing her intimidating helmet, so everything comes off and the inspection begins in earnest.

“‘Tis too much, too much of happiness!” Paris enthuses, “but perhaps it would be well for me to view each in detail, for as yet I doubt, and know not where to look — my eyes are drawn all ways at once.”

In the less hilarious other versions, the girls towel off before approaching Paris one by one. Pick me, said Hera, and I’ll see that you become king of all Europe and Asia. Pick me, said Athena, and you will have the wisdom and skill to win any war. Aphrodite is next, and in Lucian’s playlet she comes on like Mae West: “Here I am. Take your time, and examine carefully. Let nothing escape your vigilance.”

Say I’m the one, said Aphrodite, and I’ll give you Helen of Sparta, the wife of the Greek king Menelaus, who really is, if we’re all totally honest here, the most beautful woman in creation.

Presented with a choice among real estate, cleverness and a very sexy other-man’s-wife, Paris naturally handed the golden apple to Aphrodite. Hera was livid, meaning Zeus was in for a nasty time, and the Greeks hit the roof, as depicted in the aforementioned Brad Pitt movie. Paris securing Helen as his mate would mean war. Athena, who liked war actually, decided to help the Greeks fight the Trojans.

All of this was lost on Paris’ father, King Priam of Troy.

And now the rest of our nominees for Best Lusty Ensemble Comedy. Please hold your applause until the end.

One of the local bigwigs in Berne, Switzerland, paid Niklaus Manuel (c 1484-1530) to paint this, and that’s why it’s got his patron’s coats of arms hanging in the tree.

Giulio Bonasone (c 1498-c 1574), the Bolognese, another explorer of myth and the Bible, has an admirable go.

Giulio Romano (1499-1546) catches the moment when Hermes leads Aphrodite, Athena and Hera in their descent from the clouds to find Paris working on his tan.

Paolo Veronese of Verona (1528-88), the great colourist and rival of Titian and Tintoretto. I don’t know if, at this stage, he was working his way up or down to the crowd scene in “The Wedding at Cana”.

Franz Floris (1519-70), the Dutch mannerist who Brueghel the Elder called “The Incomparable”, returned from Italy with Titian’s hues and Michelangelo’s figures in his pocket.

Gifted with woodcuts and engraving, the German painter Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) offered a remarkable, detailed vision.

Among the many beckoning landscapes for which the Italy-based Frenchman Claude Lorrain (1600-82) is famous is this “Judgement” tapestry, another long view. We can only crane our necks and hope to hear what they’re saying.

Michael Peverett, on the website A Brief History of Western Culture, offers an engaging reading of the three versions by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) while focusing on this one from the National Gallery in London, done sometime between 1632 and 1635. This painting, he says, may have belonged to Cardinal Richelieu, and in France would have influenced Watteau and Boucher’s own renditions.

Peverett observes a scene that’s tranquil despite the recriminatory presence in the stormy sky of the Fury, Alecto, and the sinister visage of the Gorgon on Athena’s shield by the tree. Paris’ dog seems calm, but it’s menaced, as its master makes his fateful choice, by Hera’s peacock. Is Hera, her back to us as part of the triple rotating figure-set of goddesses, caught in mid-undress or is she yanking up her kit in anger at being spurned?

Graceful Athena, meanwhile, reacts with a dancer’s enactment of dismay at Paris’ unwise decision, and Aphrodite feigns modesty.

The 1639 version by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) at the Prado in Madrid was commissioned by King Philip IV, and is believed to feature Rubens’ second wife, Hélène Fourment, in the role of Aphrodite.

Another version from the 16th-century Lowlands, this one by Hendrick van Balen (1575-1632), the Flemish tutor of Van Dyck.

A sumptuous version from 1615 by the Dutch painter and engraver Joachim Anthonisz Wtewael (1566-1638), who always had a million things going on in his canvases, many of them quite naughty.

The Dutch painter and printmaker Jan Both (c 1610-52) has us stumbling onto the myth and keeping our distance as we try and take it all in. This is a team effort, the lovely, pastoral landscape painted by Both and the edgy, let-me-at-her figures by Cornelis van Poelenbergh.

Adriaen van der Werff (1659-1722) became a very wealthy Dutchman painting religious, mythological — and erotic — scenes. He must have been born to do the painting above left. On the right Aphrodite gets the drop on Paris in a startling depiction by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). He seems to be flinging out his arm in defence at the sight of her private parts. No wonder Baroque made a comeback with this comic ballet going on.

French Rococo enters the picture with Jean-François de Troy the tapestry specialist (1679-1752).

Everyone thought the precocious Irishman James Barry (1741-1806) was crazy — he turned out to be merely romantic. William Blake thought he was the cat’s meow.

Juste Francois Boucher (1703-70) took Rococo to new heights in France with a voluptuous neo-classicism that earned the heart and the pocketbook of Madame de Pompadour.

The prophetic English poet William Blake (1757-1827), friend of mystics, chalked out his Judgement of myth in 1817, well after he’d reassessed Milton, but before he moved on to the Inferno.

The Italian engraver Francesco Bartolozzi (1725-1815) gives the tale what art critic Michael Peverett has described as “the most novelistic of treatments”, with Aphrodite and Paris striking their deal in a fanciful decorative setting.

The curators at the Liverpool Museums, where William Etty’s “The Judgement of Paris” from 1826 hangs in the Lady Lever Gallery, say he was the best-suited English artist of his era to paint “three beautiful nude women — with a smattering of nubile nymphs thrown into the background for good measure”. The man liked his naked ladies.

Women, Etty said, were “God’s most glorious work”, and when he was elected to the Royal Academy he said the lofty position had better not get in the way of his mucking in with the students when there’s a willing nude woman around. He kept it up, as it were, until his death. His rendition of “Judgement” was commissioned by the fourth Earl of Darnley for £500, but Darnley reneged upon delivery and Etty spent eight years nagging him and then his next-of-kin for payment, finally settling for £475.

A veritable bear for ancient-Greek-style sculpture, George Frederic Watts (1817-1904) has terrific monuments all over England, and his home in Compton, now the Watts Gallery, is a place of pilgrimage, though the old fellow himself hangs around London.

Paul Cezanne is another one the online poster shops churn out, and here again, like Dali, we have more than one version of his “Judgement of Paris” from 1862. At a glance, these could be any of his paintings of bathers.

Ludwig von Hofmann’s “The Judgement of Paris” from 1904 seems to have cut to the chase and done without Paris altogether so we could concentrate on the nubile ladies in the altogether.

Auguste Renoir’s “The Judgement of Paris” from 1914 — this is the bas-relief; Photobucket won’t let me show you the painting for some reason (!) — has Paris on his knees before chubby goddesses, who in this case are identified as the Roman equivalents, Juno, Minerva and Venus. The Frenchman, his hands by then atrophied with arthritis, was more interested in decoration than storytelling.

Yes, Pablo too. Why not, eh?

British painter Robert Hodgins reconstructed “The Judgement of Paris” in 2002 so that it looks more like an aspiring client checking out the whores on Seventh Avenue. Maybe he’s right.

The American purveyor of photorealism Charles Bell (1935-1995) brings the beauty-pageant aspect of the tale to the fore. The one below goes all out with Barbie herself, though I’m not sure if this is also Bell’s doing.

Do feminists always have the last word? Mary Ellen Croteau (1930- ) from Chicago turns things upside down in her “Judgement of Paris” from 2006. Fair enough, I say.

There are many websites featuring these artworks and even more versions of the Judgement — by Veneziano, Fantin-Latour, Denning and plenty of others. Perhaps the best sites are Philip Resheph’s The Trojan War: An illustrated companion and the online face of Beloit College in Wisconsin, but I’ve always been a little disappointed with the presentations I’ve seen. Here I’m just trying to smoothe out the canvas a little.