Vulcan and Maia

For a long time the bearded god here was taken for Jupiter. The armour and the smith's hammer give him away as Vulcan, the god of fire and the forge. The woman beside him, with a horn of plenty and a wreath of grain, is Maia, an old Italian goddess of spring and growth. The pairing is less random than it looks. The late Roman writer Macrobius records that on the first of May the priest of Vulcan offered a sacrifice to Maia. Spranger painted the scene around 1585 for Rudolf II in Prague, on a copper plate about 22 centimetres tall, as a companion to his Hercules and Omphale. The museum suggests that the goddess's languid, provocative pose was borrowed from a print by Agostino Veneziano, an engraver from Raphael's circle in Rome, showing the suicide of Cleopatra.