Selene and Endymion

The museum gives this canvas two names. Its list of masterpieces calls it Diana and Endymion, while the text in the gallery speaks of Selene. Both have a claim. In the older form of the myth it is the moon herself, Selene, who falls in love with Endymion, a young shepherd asleep on a mountainside, and later poets handed the story to Diana, the Roman goddess the moon had come to be identified with.

Luca Giordano painted it between 1675 and 1680 as one of a pair with a Bacchus and Ariadne, and the museum reads both as pictures of love that arrives during sleep. Here it arrives by night, in a pastoral setting. The goddess comes flying in, wrapped in blue drapery, to the sleeping shepherd. In the room where the pair hang today, the museum notes, that cobalt blue echoes in the coloured stucco of the ceiling.