Danaé

Titian returned to this subject for years. The princess Danae, shut away by her father because a prophecy warned that her son would one day kill him, is reached anyway by the god Jupiter, who pours himself through the roof as a shower of gold. Titian first painted it in Rome in the 1540s for a cardinal, and the face was said to belong to the cardinal's own mistress. This later version, from around 1554, belongs to the set of mythological pictures he made for Prince Philip of Spain, the future Philip II. An old servant on the right scrambles to catch the falling gold coins in her apron, which pulls a myth about desire down to something plainer and more human. Catherine the Great bought this canvas for the Hermitage in 1772, shipped up from Paris.