The Dream of Paris

Peter Gertner's The Dream of Paris, dated 1522 and now at the Art Institute of Chicago, depicts the legendary dream of Paris — son of King Priam of Troy — in which the three goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite appeared before him to be judged for the golden apple inscribed 'for the fairest,' an episode narrated in classical mythology as the ultimate cause of the Trojan War. Gertner was a Nuremberg painter working in the shadow of Dürer and the humanist culture of the city's intellectual elite, and his treatment of this classical subject demonstrates the penetration of humanist mythological learning into German painting by the early 1520s. The Judgement of Paris was popular in northern European humanist circles because it offered a pretext for depicting three nude goddesses side by side, combining classical authority with the pleasure of the female nude. The Art Institute's holding makes this a notable example of German Renaissance mythological painting in an American collection.

The dream format allows the painter to present the divine apparition in a landscape setting with Paris asleep or recumbent in the foreground. The three goddesses are rendered in a northern variant of the classical nude informed by Dürer's studies of human proportion but retaining German linear characteristics. The landscape setting reflects the northern European tradition of detailed woodland naturalism.