Rape of Proserpina

This one hangs in the same room, and the two were probably made as a pair. Here the story runs the other way, toward the underworld rather than away from it. Pluto, who rules it, hauls the young Proserpina up into his chariot to carry her below, and the flames and sulphurous cinders on the left mark where they are headed. The strange touch is the driver. Steering the chariot is Cupid, the boy god of love, which turns an abduction into the start of a courtship. In the old story Proserpina becomes queen of the dead, and her mother Ceres' grief for her gives the world its winter. Padovanino borrowed the girl's twisting pose from a drawing by the older Venetian master Titian, now in Cambridge.