Mercury Abducting the Goddess Contento

The story here was barely a decade old when it was first painted. It comes from a Spanish picaresque novel, Guzmán de Alfarache, that Mateo Alemán published in 1599 and that reached Italy in translation by 1606: on earth the god Contento, contentment itself, was loved above all the other gods, and Jupiter, jealous, sent Mercury down to carry him off and leave his twin, Discontent, in his place. No one had ever made a picture of it until the German painter Adam Elsheimer did in Rome around 1607, and it was Elsheimer who turned Contento from a god into the goddess you see lifted into the air. Van Stalbemt, working in Antwerp, took up that brand-new invention and made his own version of it. Mercury, in his winged cap, hauls the goddess up above a packed crowd of her worshippers while Jupiter directs him from the clouds. Look past them to the background, where people are still eating, drinking and at their games, not yet aware that the thing they love most is being taken out from over their heads.