_Rubens_ (Flemish: 1577-1640). _See 38._
At the wedding of Thetis and Peleus an apple was thrown amongst the
guests by the Goddess of Discord, to be given to the most beautiful.
Paris, the Trojan shepherd, was ordered by Jupiter to decide the
contest. He is here seated with Mercury, the messenger of the gods,
at his side, about to award the apple to Venus. On the right of Venus
is Juno with her peacock at her feet; on the left, Minerva, with her
owl perched behind her. Paris thus chose Pleasure, instead of Power or
Wisdom; and from his choice came, the story adds, all the troubling
of domestic peace involved in the Trojan War. The Goddess of Discord,
already assured of her victory and its consequences, hovers in the
clouds above, spreading fire and pestilence.
This picture--one of Rubens's masterpieces and "evidently entirely
the work of his own hand"--belongs to his latest period; "never did
he show his intense appreciation of the beauty of flesh and the
delights of colour more conspicuously than in the pictures of his old
age." Characteristic also is the painter's treatment of the subject.
The goddesses are as substantial as any figures of flesh and blood;
the picture is realistic, not symbolic. An exactly opposite method
of treatment was exemplified in Mr. Watt's "Judgment of Paris,"
exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1887. Paris was left out, for
does not every lover have the same choice to make for himself? and the
goddesses were soft visionary forms of purely ideal beauty (_cf. Modern
Painters_, vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. viii. § 7).