Cupid Complaining to Venus

The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that the number of extant versions suggests that this was one of Cranach's most successful compositions.

The work has been interpreted as an allegory of the pleasure and pains of love, and possibly also a warning of the risks of venereal disease.

A stone below Venus's raised foot bears an inscription of a winged serpent with a ring in its mouth, a heraldic device granted to Cranach by Frederick the Wise in 1508.

The paint was applied to a chalk ground of powdered calcium carbonate bound with glue, which was primed with white lead.

In June 1962 the Thorp Brothers of New York transferred it a Masonite support, with the back veneered in mahogany and cradled to resemble a work on a wooden board.

The four line inscription is taken from Latin translations of Theocritus, variously attributed to Ercole Strozzi and Philip Melanchthon or to Georg Sabinus, which reads:

As Cupid was stealing honey from the hive A bee stung the thief on the finger And so do we seek transitory and dangerous pleasures That are mixed with sadness and bring us pain The provenance of the National Gallery version is not known for nearly four centuries after its execution in the early 16th century until it was sold from the collection of the Frankfurt art collector Emil Goldschmidt after his death in 1909.

At the 1909 sale, it may have been acquired by a Chemnitz businessman Hans Hermann Vogel, and later sold by his widow in 1935 to Robert Allmers [de], president of the Reichsverbandes der deutschen Automobilindustrie (German Association of the Automotive Industry), when it was described as a work by Lucas Cranach depicting Venus und Amor als Honigdieb.