Sources of the episode

As with many mythological tales, details vary depending on the source. The brief allusion to the Judgement in the Iliad  shows that the episode initiating all the subsequent action was already familiar to its audience; a...
fuller version was told in the Cypria, a lost work of the Epic Cycle, of which only fragments  remain. The later writers Ovid , Lucian, Apollodorus  and Hyginus, retell the story with skeptical, ironic or popularizing agendas. But it appeared wordlessly on the ivory and gold votive chest of the 7th-century tyrant Cypselus at Olympia, which was described by Pausanias as showing:

The subject was favoured by painters of Red-figure pottery as early as the sixth century BC, and remained popular in Greek and Roman art, before enjoying a significant revival, as an opportunity to show three female nudes, in the Renaissance.