The Three Graces

When Hans von Aachen painted these three interlaced nudes around 1604, he was working for one of the strangest courts in Europe. Emperor Rudolf II had moved the seat of the Holy Roman Empire to Prague and filled his castle with astronomers, alchemists, and cabinets of curiosities. Kepler and Tycho Brahe worked out the motion of the planets a few rooms away. Rudolf had a particular appetite for polished, sensual mythologies, and von Aachen, his court painter, supplied them. The Three Graces were the companions of Venus, standing for beauty, charm, and abundance, and painters liked the subject because it let them show one female body from three sides at once. Von Aachen also traveled for the emperor as an agent, buying and commissioning art across the continent to feed that enormous collection.