Danaë

Titian

Oil on canvas

Museo di Capodimonte

Titian's Danaë depicts the mythological princess Danaë reclining nude upon a draped bed as a shower of gold—the god Jupiter transformed by desire—descends upon her from above, with the small figure of Cupid attending at her right. Painted in oil on canvas for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese during Titian's sojourn in Rome, the composition unfolds with the warm luminosity and sensuous colorito that define the Venetian High Renaissance at its apex. Titian (Tiziano Vecellio, c. 1488–1576), who dominated European painting for much of the sixteenth century, drew upon antique sculpture, Michelangelo's figure of Night, and his own earlier Venus of Urbino to construct an image of unprecedented erotic directness and painterly refinement. The work became the prototype for at least five further versions produced by Titian and his workshop, and its influence extended to Rembrandt, Anthony van Dyck, and Gustav Klimt, establishing it as one of the most consequential mythological nudes in Western art.