Mercury and Aglauros

When this canvas came up at auction in Paris in the 1760s, it was sold as a Rembrandt. A few years later, in other Paris sales, it had become a Johann Liss, a German painter who had worked in Venice, and it often travelled with a supposed companion, Mercury and Argus, which is now in Los Angeles. By 1854, when the Boston collector Francis Brooks bought it in Paris, it bore a false signature, Rembrandt 1652, and was thought to show Danaë receiving Jupiter in a shower of gold. The Museum of Fine Arts bought it from the Brooks estate in 1903 for 27,500 dollars, still as a Rembrandt. Only in 1986 did the Dutch scholar Frederik Duparc publish it as an early work by Carel Fabritius, painted around 1645 to 1647. The story is from Ovid. Mercury has fallen for Herse and offers her sister Aglauros gold to let him in. The goddess Minerva has filled Aglauros with jealousy, so she refuses, and the painting catches the moment just before the god turns her to stone.