Ganymede Abducted by the Eagle

This was one of a set of private pictures Correggio painted around 1531 for Federico Gonzaga, the ruler of Mantua, on the loves of the god Jupiter. They were adult pictures for a prince's inner rooms, each showing Jupiter seizing a mortal in one disguise or another. Here he is the eagle, carrying off the boy Ganymede to be cup-bearer to the gods, the child twisting in the bird's grip with his little dog left barking on the ground below. Correggio pushes the whole thing upward, so you see it from beneath, the boy shooting into the sky. The set was later given to Emperor Charles V and drifted across Europe, and this panel and its companion Jupiter and Io both ended up in Vienna, where they hang today.