Perseus Freeing Andromeda

Andromeda, a king's daughter chained to a rock by the sea as an offering to a monster, is freed by the hero Perseus, who flies in, kills the beast and wins her. The story comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, a favourite source for painters of the time. Fetti painted it on a small, wide panel around 1621 or 1622, the unsettled months when he was leaving Mantua for Venice. The picture's later travels are better documented than its making. By the late 1630s it belonged to the Scottish nobleman James Hamilton, later the first Duke of Hamilton, who was buying Venetian painting in quantity. After Hamilton was executed in 1649, in the aftermath of the English Civil War, much of his collection was bought by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Habsburg governor of the Netherlands, and so came to Vienna. Somewhere along the way the panel was cut down by about 20 centimetres on the right. It only entered the picture gallery in 1928, taken over from the state furniture depot.