Nymphs Bathing

Around 1514 a Milanese gentleman called Gerolamo Rabia had Luini paint the walls of his country house, La Pelucca, out past Monza. The chapel there got saints. The other rooms got this: women stepping out of their clothes and into water, with nothing Christian anywhere in the scene.

Scholars read it as a moment from Ovid. Callisto, one of the huntress Diana's nymphs, has been made pregnant by Jupiter and has kept it hidden, and the bath is where her companions find out. Luini stages it very quietly. The women are simply undressing, and the whole story sits in what one of them is about to be seen to be.

The fresco no longer has its wall. It was cut away in the 1820s and mounted on wooden boards, which is why something painted on plaster now hangs like a panel in Room 10, a little over two and a third metres wide.