Cupid as Honey Thief [fragment]

This fragment once belonged to a painting showing Venus and Cupid as Honey Thief. The composition is based on an idyll by the Greek poet Theocritus whose moralizing content rang a chord with Cranach's contemporaries. Cupid, looking for honey, is stung by bees. When he complains to his mother Venus, she admonishes him that the sting of his arrows was far more painful than that of the bees.

With startled bees buzzing around his head, the winged god of love stands on a grass-covered forest floor next to a hollow tree trunk with a beehive inside it. His right hand still lingering in the gap from which he has taken his spoils, Cupid holds the stolen honeycomb in his left. He gazes anxiously up at his mother Venus, who is to be imagined as a nude standing at his side - as we know from intact versions of the scene.

[Elsbeth Wiemann, http://onlinekatalog.staatsgalerie.de/detail.jsp?id=624D66444019F423DA8F11A233296684&img=1; 22-07-2015]