Hermaphroditus and the Nymph Salmacis

Ovid tells this story in the Metamorphoses. Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, is a young man wandering through Asia Minor when he comes to a clear pool, the home of the nymph Salmacis. She wants him at once and he refuses her. When he steps into the water to bathe she dives in after him, wraps herself around him and prays that they never be parted, and the gods merge the two into a single body. Spranger paints the moment before any of that happens. The youth has no idea he is being watched, while the nymph, spying on him, turns her own body out towards us, and the museum points out how the whole scene is staged for its sensual charge. He made it around 1580 to 1582, in his first years as court painter to Rudolf II, and it belonged to the emperor's collection. It is a canvas over a metre tall, far larger than the little coppers Spranger painted for the same emperor a few years later.