Dánae

The story comes from Greek myth. A king shuts his daughter Danae in a tower to keep her from any man, and the god Jupiter reaches her anyway, pouring himself in through the roof as a shower of gold. Titian painted this scene again and again from the 1540s onward, because Europe's princes could not get enough of it. His reclining nudes were so admired that patrons kept asking for repetitions, and he ran a busy workshop in Venice to supply them. This canvas is one of those later versions, made around the middle of the 16th century with his assistants' help, and it eventually passed into the Habsburg imperial collection in Vienna. An old servant at the right scrambles to catch the falling coins in her apron. Where she sees only money, Danae looks up at the god himself.