Cranachs from Copenhagen.

Whilst the Kunstmuseum in Copenhagen is being refurbished, the London National Gallery has been enriched by the loan of three of its Cranachs: The Judgement of Paris, Cupid the Honey-Thief and Melancholia. There are ten paintings attributed to Lucas Cranach the Elder in the Copenhagen gallery, but only these three are of undisputed authenticity. They were in the Danish royal collection well before the eighteenth century, and may have belonged to Christian II, who fled to Wittenberg, where Cranach painted his portrait, in 1523.

They may be compared with variants, wholly or largely the work of the Elder Cranach, already in this country. The Judgement of Paris at Hampton Court has been in the British royal collection since at least the reign of James II. It was possibly presented to Henry VIII by Cranach's patron, the Elector John Frederick of Saxony, who was trying to form a Protestant League in Northern Europe from 1531 onwards. John Frederick sent an embassy to Henry VIII in 1539. If, as was customary, the ambassador brought a gift, it may well have been this small panel. Anne of Cleves, whom Henry VIII married for six months in 1540, was the Elector's sister-in-law. Cupid the Honey-Thief was bought by the National Gallery in 1963, and has been starkly cleaned. Melancholia, benignly lent by the Earl of Crawford, is in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh.

Whilst there is no direct reference to the three goddesses' beauty-competition in the Iliad, the myth persisted in Greek Literature from Euripides's Trojan Women to Lucian's ribald Dialogues of the Gods. In the thirteenth-century age of chivalry Guido delle Colonne took up the story in his Historia Destructionis Troiae, which was imitated in most western European languages. The first book William Caxton printed was an English translation of a French compendium of the tales of Troy. The illuminations and, later, woodcuts in these Troy Romances always represented Paris and Mercury in late-medieval costume: Paris as a knight in armour and Mercury as a herald: a reverend signor fantastically plumed (half-bird sometimes, not just wing-sandalled). Consistently, in The Judgement of Paris (from Cranach's Studio) in the Bode Museum, Berlin, Mercury is feathered from neck to ankles. In classical times Mercury was thought of as an unageing youth and, indeed, the stepson of Juno, one of the competing goddesses, but the astrologers of the Middle Ages saw him as an elderly sage who, in his planetary guise, presided over artists and scholars; which is how Cranach's contemporary, the Master of the Housebook, depicted him.

Cranach painted six versions of The Judgement of Paris between 1527 and 1537, although he interrupted the sequence with pictures of The Three Graces, three of which, dated from 1531 to 1535, survived the destruction and looting of the Second World War. The two series cohere. The three goddesses of The Judgement of Paris are positioned in guileless attitudes (front, side and back) like the three Graces, and a model for The Three Graces sometimes reappears as one of the goddesses. Around their necks the Graces and the goddesses wear jewelled collars and gold chains, which may be evidence that Cranach was able to persuade ladies of the insouciant Saxon courts to pose naked for him, or at least allow him to impose their portraits on anonymous nudities.

In 1534 Cranach painted a portrait, now in the Dresden Gemaldegalerie, of Christiane von Eulenau, clearly a lady of some importance at the ducal court. He further depicted her as Voluptas, nude except for a prim oak-leaf, shortly after 1537, in his Hercules at the Crossroads. She also appears as one of Omphale's handmaidens in Hercules and Omphale, painted by Cranach's eldest son Hans in 1537 and now in the Thyssen Collection. Venus, in the studio picture in the Brussels Musee d'Art Ancien, at least facially resembles Sibylle of Cleves, wife of the Elector John Frederick. Lucas Cranach, fiend and supporter of Martin Luther, godfather to his children, and three times Burgomaster of Wittenberg between 1537 and 1544, remained 'a fellow of infinite jest'. The whimsical flattery of these pictures was protracted in the grim humour of his eleven pictures of Judith and Holofernes painted around the year 1530: a register of the gentlemen of the Saxon courts who had 'lost their heads' to local Judiths. The head of Holofernes in Cranach's Judith in the Stuttgart Staatsgaleie looks distinctly like that of the elector John Frederick himself although, regrettably, Judith is certainly not Sibylle of Cleves.

Future research may reveal Cranach's further use of actual portraits, as when, in 1513, the long-lived painter decorated the wedding bed of the Elector John the Steadfast and his bride Margaret of Anhalt with another Judgement of Paris. There is ample evidence that in both Italy and Germany paintings of The Judgement of Paris recorded nuptial masques in which Venus represented - or was represented by - the chosen bride. The subject of the three goddesses also had, at times, a political aspect. A tableau vivant of the three, literally in the flesh, welcomed Philip, Duke of Burgundy, when he entered the city of Antwerp in 1494. The implication was that, like Pads, he was an undisputed arbiter. A similar exposition was mounted for the Emperor Charles the Fifth's arrival at Antwerp in 1521.

In all Cranach's versions of The Judgement of Paris, Mercury caries a herald's baton, not his usual caduceus, with which he prods Paris out of his sleep. It is a measure of Cranach's deference to the Gothic past that he observes the convention, although he knew well what a caduceus was. Jacopo de' Barbari, Cranach's predecessor as court-painter to the Elector Frederick the Wise, used the caduceus as his signature. Cranach's own more modest signature was a twisting winged serpent taken from one side of Mercury's wand. The Gothic illustrators had replaced the contentious apple, to be awarded to the fairest goddess, with a contemporary artefact, such as a regal orb. In the twelve versions of The Judgement of Paris which issued from Cranach's Studio, of which at least six are wholly the work of the master himself, the trophy is a crystal sphere, circled by a golden band inscribed, 'Amor monet': Love shows the way. The sphere may be the rotating globe of Fortune (used as a symbol by Durer and other German artists) in which Venus could conjure up the image of Helen of Troy.

According to the Troy romances, the knight Paris, lost whilst hunting, tethered his horse to a tree in a little wood, lay down by a spring and, like Edmund Spenser's traveller in the Bower of Bliss, was insinuated into sleep by the water on its indistinct course through the pebbles: 'whilst creeping slomber made him to forget/His former paine'. There he was awakened by the arrival of Mercury and the three goddesses. Again Cranach followed the medieval tradition in all his versions of The Judgement of Paris. Paris, strangely, has been hunting in full armour. His accoutrements, out of date in an age of gunpowder and artillery as indeed knights themselves were, remained apt for an antique legend. Aroused by Mercury from dream to vision, he drowsily reviews the parade of the naked goddesses.

From the engraving of 1508, the goddesses in the paintings at Cologne (1512-14) and Seattle (1516-18) become progressively slimmer, until in the series of 1527-37 they take on the slender, adolescent form typical of Cranach's later female nudes, gymnastic but unemphatic in contour. In the Copenhagen version, only Venus is at ease with her nakedness. Libertines ingenues interchangeable, if clad, with the virgin saints on Cranach's altarpieces, both Pallas and Juno balance restlessly, each on one pliant foot, long in the toes and heel, so bringing into play the lithe muscularity of their athletic legs. Paris's horse looks sidelong but appraisingly at them around a tree. Above the horizon Cupid wafts in the sweetly blue air, as he waits to take aim at Paris when Helen is evoked. The contest is moved from Mount Ida in Asia Minor to Cranach's native Saxony, with his characteristic background of a pine forest, a castle on a crag and a little Gothic town in the glen below; a setting akin to Cranach's birthplace, Kronach, surmounted by Rosenburg Castle.

The Copenhagen Cupid the Honey-Thief, dated 1530, is related to the National Gallery's own version, painted before 1537, since it is signed with the bat-winged serpent which Cranach used until he lowered the wings forever in that year of mourning for the death of Hans, his eldest son. Both pictures illustrate Theocritus's apocryphal Nineteenth Idyll. Cupid is stung by bees as he steals a honeycomb from their hive. He complains to his mother Venus, who tells him that he is no better than the bees since, tiny though he too is, he also deals out grief. Inscribed on the Copenhagen panel is a moralising Latin quatrain, probably composed by Cranach's friend Melanchthon, which reflects on the final lines of the idyll. Allowing for Cranach's mistakes in transcription (since he was no Latinist) the quatrain may be translated: 'When Cupid stole honey from the beehive, a bee stung his hand. So too the transitory pleasure that we hanker after wounds us, since it is mixed with regret and sadness'. The Copenhagen Venus, smiling-faced, with a sly retrousse nose, is clad in a paradoxically transparent veil, a pearl-strung hairnet and a jewelled collar: nothing more. The London Venus, more satirical in expression and more sophisticated in air, wears only a gold chain and a large hat. It is amusing that both have the same nervous mobility as the goddesses in The Judgement of Paris. The Copenhagen Venus plays with her veil and wriggles her toes into the gravelly Thuringian soil. The London Venus (a slightly altered reverse of a goddess in the Basel Judgement of Paris) grasps the branch of an apple tree in one hand and swings her foot on a lower bough. In keeping with the idyll, neither Venus pays much attention to Cupid, perplexed and beswarmed (although he is as choicely blue-winged as an angel by Stefan Lochner and has inherited his mother's slight double-chin) as he shows her the perfidious honeycomb. Cupid's distraught attitude and his mother's laughing indifference change little in over ten versions of the subject by Cranach himself and from his Studio, which included his second son, Lucas the Younger, by no means his father's equal.

In the London rendering of Cupid's complaint to Venus, a venerable stag and its mate, faithfully and fondly perceived by the artist, browse in a nearby thicket. Further away is a lake on which two swans squabble. A dark-leafed fruit bush in the Copenhagen version accentuates Venus's fragile outline. A lake in the valley below mirrors a tiny medieval town and Cranach's customary castle on a fell. A pictorial footnote records a hazard of life in sixteenth-century Germany: beside the lake three pikemen (disbanded mercenaries, probably) attack a merchant on horseback, just as the bees harass Cupid.

Both the Edinburgh and the Copenhagen versions of Cranach's Melancholia are homely parodies of Durer's line-engraving of 1514. In both panels a little housewife, idly whittling a stick, replaces Durer's atrabilious angel. Cranach intended to suggest that indolence is the cause rather than the effect of melancholy. It may be as an example, although ill-chosen, of activity that, in the Copenhagen version, Cranach places outside the large window two parties of knights skirmishing in a pine-wood. Three unruly infants, presumably in the housewife's charge, are barked at by an equally uncontrolled dog as they make futile efforts to push a ball through a hoop too small for it. The lean dog, perhaps an ancestor of the present-day Weimaraner, may be borrowed from Durer's Melancholia, but appears in other pictures by Cranach. At the housewife's pattened feet patrol a pair of partridges, Cranach's usual symbols of domestic affection; although here one of them, self-absorbed and preening itself, ignores the other's approach. Seated on a well-stuffed cushion, the housewife has withdrawn into an inner vision. What she sees is depicted on the left: a Witches' Sabbath led by a warlock clad in slashed crimson velvet, fashionable at the time. His sallow-skinned coven is mounted on pewter-coloured wolves, boars and goats, dextrously painted on a dark cloud. Cranach, mindful of the savage witch-trials of his youth, thus dismisses the belief in witches as a splenetic delusion. The housewife has retained the wings of Durer's more baleful Melancholia. Cranach implies that she should use them to surmount her listlessness. As George Herbert wrote:

God gave thy soul brave wings; put not those feathers Into a bed, to sleep out all ill weathers.

The exhibition, CRANACH: A CLOSER LOOK, is on view at the National Gallery, London, from 18 June to 7 September, 1997. The National Gallery is open from 10.00 to 20.00 on Wednesdays and from 12.00 to 18.00 on Sundays. On all other days it is open from 10.00 to 18.00. The telephone number for enquiries is 0171.747.2885. There is no admission charge.

The author would be grateful for news of the present location of Cranach's Hercules at the Crossroads (F-R, 1932, no.328), mentioned in the article. The picture was in the care of the Munich art-dealer Julius Bohler in 1932 and may have been abducted by the gangsters of the Third Reich.