page_title: Feast of the Gods (art)
section_title: Northern Mannerism
hierarchical_section_title: Feast of the Gods (art) / Northern Mannerism
context_page_description: The Feast of the Gods or Banquet of the Gods as a subject in art showing a group of deities at table has a long history going back into antiquity. Showing Greco-Roman deities, it enjoyed a revival in popularity in the Italian Renaissance, and then in the Low Countries during the 16th century, when it was popular with Northern Mannerist painters, at least partly as an opportunity to show copious amounts of nudity.
  Often the occasion shown was specifically either the wedding of Cupid and Psyche or that of Peleus and Thetis, but other works show other occasions, especially the Feast of Bacchus, or a generalized feast. While the wedding of Cupid and Psyche is just the happy ending of Psyche's story, the wedding of Peleus and Thetis is part of the grand narrative of Greek mythology. The feast was interrupted by Eris, goddess of discord, who threw the golden Apple of Discord inscribed "for the most beautiful" into the company, provoking the argument that led to the Judgement of Paris, and ultimately to the Trojan War.
context_section_description: The revival of interest in the subject some decades later in Northern Mannerism seems to spring from a large engraving of 1587 by Hendrik Goltzius in Haarlem of a drawing by Bartholomeus Spranger (now Rijksmuseum) that Karel van Mander had brought back from Prague, where Spranger was court painter to Rudolf II.  The Feast of the Gods at the Marriage of Cupid and Psyche was so large, at 16 7/8 × 33 5/8 in. (43 × 85.4 cm), that it was printed from three different plates. Over 80 figures are shown, placed up in the clouds over a world landscape that can be glimpsed below.  The composition borrows from both Raphael and Giulio Romano's versions.
  Over the next thirty years or so a number of Netherlandish artists painted the subject, usually in small cabinet paintings, often on copper, although The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis by Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem was enormous at over four metres wide, a commission in 1593 from the Stadtholder Maurice, Prince of Orange for his palace, and Jacob Jordaens' The Golden Apple of Discord (1633, from an oil sketch by Rubens) is also a monumental treatment.  Painters who returned to the subject several times include in particular Hendrick van Balen, who was known above all for these subjects, and also Joachim Wtewael, Cornelis van Haarlem, Cornelis van Poelenburch, and Abraham Bloemaert.
  Over the same period these same painters, later followed by Rubens, produced many depictions of Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus ("Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus freezes", meaning that love needs food and wine to thrive), a proverb derived from the emblem books, which showed just Ceres, Bacchus, Venus and Cupid picnicking on the ground in most early versions, or seated at a table in some later ones.  It has been suggested that the concentration of images by the Haarlem Mannerists reflects the patronage of the powerful brewers of Haarlem.
caption: Hendrik de Clerck, 1606–1609, on copper, 54 cm × 76 cm (21 in × 30 in), Thetis and Peleus, with Eris airborne at top right
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