The Rape of Proserpine

The story comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Proserpina, the daughter of the goddess Ceres, is picking flowers with her companions beside a lake in Sicily when Pluto, god of the underworld, sees her and carries her off in his chariot. Niccolò dell'Abbate gave it a big canvas, nearly two metres each way. Pluto has her in his arms at the right, her companions are at the left, and a nymph reclines in the foreground, with a wide landscape opening out behind them. The Louvre dates it only to the third quarter of the 16th century, a span that falls mostly in the years he spent in France.

By 1727 the picture was hanging in the Palais-Royal in Paris, in the collection of the dukes of Orléans. When that collection was broken up and sold in the 1790s, it went to London, to Earl Gower, later Marquess of Stafford, and it stayed with his heirs, the dukes of Sutherland, until the Louvre bought it in 1933.