Correggio Paintings
1489 - 1534 Italy, High Renaissance
Jupiter and Io, 1531-1532
Oil on canvas, 64.37 x 27.76 inches [163.5 x 70.5 cm]
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna Mythological Art
Two vertical Correggio oil paintings depicting Jupiter and Io, datable to 1531-32, are now in Vienna.
In the first painting, Io, daughter of Inachus, the first king of Argos, and of Melia, priestess of Hera, whose anger she aroused for having attracted the attention of Zeus, is invited by the latter, at night, in a dream, to follow him and lie with him in the meadows of Lerna. Zeus, camouflaged within a blackish cloud of constantly changing forms and in which his face and hand can be seen, undergoes new metamorphoses to conceal their loving from indiscreet gazes, covering them "with mist to show that divine things are concealed in the human face," as Ovid puts it in his story.
Correggio depicts the naked priestess ,leaning against a white sheet and her body and face conveying an impression of ecstasy, of pleasure and amorous rapture, revealing a particular capture for erotic suggestiveness. This was what was demanded by the culture of the Duke of Mantua and his court, which did not shrink from the power of painting to stir the imagination. The chiaroscuro is particularly effective, with the rocky sward covered with shrubs suggesting an abandoned place ideally suited to a secret assignation.
