Danae

Gossaert painted this in 1527, when artists in the Low Countries were hungrily taking in what was happening in Italy. The subject is Danae, a princess locked away by her father after a prophecy that her son would one day kill him. The god Zeus reaches her anyway, pouring in through the roof as a shower of gold, and the coins fall into her lap. Gossaert sets her among columns, and through them you can pick out buildings in wildly different styles, an Italian palace, a Gothic spire, a round classical tower, as if he were showing off every kind of architecture he knew. She wears a deep blue mantle slipping from one shoulder. Older painters had treated Danae as a model of chastity, and Gossaert keeps some of that while quietly letting the old erotic charge of the story back in.