Mercury beholds Herse

The story comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses. On a feast day in Athens, girls carried offerings up to the temple of Athena, and Mercury, flying over the city, caught sight of Herse, the most beautiful daughter of the Athenian king Cecrops. He turned back to earth for her. Jan Boeckhorst paints that first look, with Herse among her sisters on the way to the temple. In Ovid the affair ends badly for one of those sisters, Aglauros. Consumed by envy, she barred the god's way to Herse's room and was turned to stone on the threshold. The subject sold well, and Boeckhorst painted it several times with small variations. This version, from around 1650, belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Habsburg governor of the Spanish Netherlands, whose collection later came to Vienna.