With hearty thanks to my recent new subscribers on Substack, I present a bonus newsletter on the enduring and ultra-flexible creativity of Greek Mythology.
The Judgment of Paris sounds a bit like some kind of treaty or conference taking place in France, but it’s actually one of the most famous and retold stories from Greek Mythology.
For me, it was most likely the first exposure I ever had to the subject, when I was about six or seven years old.
I came across the story by chance. My father had a book, probably about Renaissance painting, open in his study. And the book was open to the page where the painting below (from the Metropolitan Museum of Art) was shown.
Image and docent paragraph here.
I had no idea what the picture was about, but was fascinated by it, mainly the ladies. What were these women doing standing out in the open naked while the men were in full armor? The future scholar in me wanted to know.
This painting, as I found out later, is called “The Judgment of Paris” and is attributed to an artist named Lucas Cranach the Elder, who created it in about 1528, or about two thousand years after the story first became wildly popular.
It may not have been until graduate school some twenty years later that I saw that painting again and connected it with the story of the “beauty contest” between the goddesses Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite, presided over by the Trojan prince, Paris.
By then I knew that the goddesses were vying for a golden apple with the word kallistei (“for the fairest”) written on it in ancient Greek. It had been thrown into the middle of a wedding reception by the goddess of strife, Eris, causing the competition.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the “fairest” of them all?
I still don’t know why the goddesses in the Cranach painting had to be naked to show their beauty, though it seems that every painting about Greek Mythology that was done in the Renaissance has to have someone naked in it—and art historians have sometimes called Cranach’s paintings (according to the Met’s Helmut Nickel) “transparent cover for a sixteenth-century version of pinup pictures.”
Whatever the case, it seems obvious at first glance that “beauty” for this painter has to do with physical beauty, and the judgment that Paris is making is about how the goddesses look.
It wasn’t always so.
Consider this vase painting, done something like fifteen hundred years earlier. These paintings were extremely popular all over the ancient Mediterranean world. They were in a way like movie still posters—memorable moments in an entertaining story.
Image found here.
There is no female nudity here. Rather, it is Paris (the seated young man—the standing god with the helmet is Hermes) who is unclothed. This is a strong preference for the time, and a long story for another post about why that is so.
Instead, I want to concentrate on what the goddesses are holding.
Originally, the goddesses offered Paris a gift or bribe for choosing one of them over the others. Athena offered prowess as a battle leader, Hera offered kingship, and Aphrodite offered marriage to the most beautiful woman in the world.
You can see the vase painter is aware of these choices: if you look closely, you see Athena left of center holding out a battle helmet, signifying her gift. Hera, on the far left, holds the scepter of kingship and offers the statue of a lion, the symbol of kingly authority and, not coincidentally, the totem animal for her favorite city in Greece, Mycenae.
Aphrodite offers two things: in her left hand kneels a little divinity called a Grace (“Charis” in Greek), who holds a necklace, signifying female beauty. The Charites were often depicted as goddesses who adorn brides on their wedding day.
In her right hand, Aphrodite holds a crown of leaves, a traditional symbol of marriage.
So this isn’t really a “judgment” about the physical beauty of the goddesses. It’s a choice that Paris is making about his future. What kind of life does he want to live? Does he want to be a great warrior who wins glory in the front lines? A king who stands back from the fray in ultimate authority?
Or does he want to have the status and pleasure of marriage to a supermodel?
The “proper” choice, for the Greeks, is not Aphrodite, especially since the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, is already married, and when Paris chooses Aphrodite his choice sets in motion the events leading to the Trojan War and the eventual destruction of his city.
The Greeks valued family above all else, and they would’ve wanted Paris, a royal son, to choose a role in life that would help his family (and by extension, his city) survive.
But he went the other way, disastrously.
So the writing on the apple, “for the fairest,” does not really indicate “fair” as in physical beauty. It indicates “fair” as in the most preferable life that a Greek should live.
How did the original idea of the bribes that relate to Paris’s future life morph into a beauty contest? How did Cranach’s goddesses not only lose their clothes, but also the symbols of the gifts they offered?
That is one of the things I am researching for my book, THE INVENTION OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY.
We know that a really good, creative story will be retold even after it leaves its original cultural context. It will be bent to go in a different direction or have a different emphasis, blended with other stories, or even reimagined (“broken”) to be something it never was before.
Cranach’s painting, to my mind, is a “breaking” of the story, making it a beauty contest that foregrounds the goddesses rather than a choice that focuses on Paris.
Does this have to do with the prevailing culture of the time? Was there some enormous interest in beauty contests? Or does it have to do simply with an artist who wanted to show female nudity in a sexy way? All of the above?
The aforementioned Mr. Nickel of the Metropolitan Museum has theorized instead that the painting may have a hidden meaning beyond the beauty contest: it might be an allegory of the three-phase process of alchemy, turning base metal into gold. The goddesses would symbolize the three phases.
Hmmmmm.
(The article is worth the read, if you have access to jstor.org.)
Whatever the truth, alchemy is a good metaphor for what happens to Greek Mythology through the ages: though it never goes from worthless to valuable, it certainly changes its form over and over again, as it is exposed to new ideas, diverse cultures, and different ways of looking at the world.
Your thoughts welcome in the comments below!
This is such a great explanation. I think most medieval representations of Greek and other mythologies seem condescending to those mythologies, just as the 19th century 'gentlemen' who drove much of early anthropology and archaeology (tomb raiding at the time) were incredibly misogynistic, not just in their own lives, but in their assessments of ancient societies and religions. We are still, in western civ, still trying to (or wallowing in) release ourselves from the narrow judgements which can really only be ascribed to the medieval and subsequent victorian and Edwardian eras as the prevailing attitudes toward life, religion and gender.