The Nymph of the Spring

This painting of the Nymph of the Spring after 1537 by Lucas Cranach the Elder hangs in the National Gallery of Art is Washington, DC. It is one of many of Cranach's depictions of this subject.

A note of ambiguity or unease often gives a piquant quality to German adaptations of the Renaissance ideal. Cranach's painting of a classical nymph represents an Italian theme but gives it a moralizing twist common to late Gothic courtly and amorous subjects.

The nymph reclines beside a spring, perhaps a reference to a legendary ancient Roman fountain with which a Latin verse was associated. The text was translated by Alexander Pope in 1725:

Nymph of the grot, these springs I keep, And to the murmurs of these waters sleep; Ah, spare my slumbers, gently tread the cave! And drink in silence, or in silence lave!

The inscription on this painting -- I am the nymph of the sacred spring, do not disturb my sleep. I am resting -- may be an allusion to the poem. Though exposed by modern scholarship as a fifteenth-century counterfeit, the poem influenced Italian garden decoration, which not infrequently included fountains with attendant reclining nymphs. However, the proportions of Cranach's nude are more Gothic than classical, and the robe on which she rests her head is that of a German court lady. Far from sleeping, she admires herself beguilingly through lowered eyelids. The painting is intended both as an enticement and a warning to Cranach's sophisticated patrons. -- NGA

The quiver of arrows is taken to suggest that the nymph may be a (virgin) follower of Diana.

The partridges are said to represent lust.

The Latin motto appears pinned like a note in the upper right corner of the painting.

FONTIS NYMPHA SACRI SOM

NUM NE RUMPE QUIESCO.

This is usually translated as “I am the Nymph of the Sacred Spring. Do not disturb my sleep. I am resting.” but Clair Jewitt and  Diane Watt in their 2017 book The Arts of 17th-Century Science: Representations of the Natural World in European and North American Culture suggest another view.

...the inscription at the upper-left part of the picture, which reads, ‘Here I sleep, nymph of the spring; do not disturb my sleep’ [Fontis nympha sacri somnurn ne rumpe quiesco] is ambiguous because rumpere not only means ‘to disturb’ (the nymph's sleep) but also ‘to tear apart’ (her veil) and in this sense the inscription contains a barely disguised invitation to rape. -- Jewitt & Watt

 The Veil

They go on to suggest a connection between the anatomical use of  ‘nymphae’ to refer to the labia minora and the nymph of the spring.

Cranach's painting allows for another reading as well: in the context of anatomy's appropriation of the nymphs to describe both the female external genitals and women's erotic pleasure, the representation of the spring might be regarded as a visualisation of the anatomical nature of the nymphae before anatomy. In fact, Crooke's description of the nymphae reads like a version of Cranach's painting, if one substitutes spring for nymphae and water for urine: ‘the nymphae [the spring] leade the urine [water] through a long passage as it were between two walles, receyving it from the bottome of the cleft as out of a Tunnell: from whence it is that it runneth forth in a broad stream with a hissing noise’. Envisaged in this way, the connection between anatomy's nymphae and the mythological world of the water nymphs fabricated by Crooke and Peucer is more than a metaphorical reference/reverence. Connecting water nymphs and the female genitals was not confined to the realm of anatomy. In Martin Opitz's famous ‘Schäfferey von der Nimfen Hercinie’ the narrator remarks that ‘whosoever drinks from the clitoral fountain shall not like the smell even of wine anymore’.  -- Jewitt & Watt.

The Spring