The Judgment of Paris

Giovanni Sons

National Gallery of Art

Three nude women, three men, and a child stand or sit under the canopies of trees close to us as others move through a deep mountainous landscape in this horizontal painting. The people all have pale skin and muscular proportions. The women also have blond or light brown hair and delicate facial features. The women stand facing us and a nude man, who sits with his back to us at the bottom center of the composition. The man, Paris, sits on a ruby-red cloth and holds out a round, golden apple in one hand. The woman at the center of the trio takes the apple from him. A winged, nude, baby-like putto standing at her feet reaches one hand toward Paris and holds a bow down by his side in his other hand. Translucent white cloth covers that woman’s head and wraps in front of her groin, and a sapphire-blue robe falls from her shoulders. The woman to our left wears a gold helmet. She has a spear on one side and holds the index finger and thumb of the other hand up. The woman to our right hunches forward as she leans, also with one hand up, toward the apple while looking at Paris. She wears a gold tiara and white cloth falls from her shoulder and flutters over her buttocks. Just beyond Paris and to our left, another man leans one elbow against a tree stump and raises the other hand toward the trio of women. He holds a staff with two intertwining serpents in one hand and wears a brimmed cap with gold wings and a harvest-yellow robe over a red tunic. A bearded man sits beside an overturned urn near the lower right corner. Water pours from the vessel to a river along the bottom edge of the canvas. Trees with dark green canopies frame the scene, which opens onto a vast landscape beyond the women. A man pursues a woman in the shadows of the trees to our left. A woman and child ride a donkey as another woman walks alongside it in the near distance beyond the trees to our right. Deer drink from the river, which winds into the distance, and a man walks over a natural bridge there. Faint white dots suggest sheep grazing on a grassy field in the distance, which leads back to a building complex. A round structure there is surrounded by panel-like buttresses. Three obelisks stand around what might be a tomb. More buildings and statues are hazy where the land meets the horizon, about two-thirds of the way up the composition. Ivory-white clouds are streaked across a turquoise-blue sky above.