Giove nelle sembianze di Diana e la ninfa Callisto

The trick in this picture is a disguise. Jupiter wanted the nymph Callisto, who had sworn herself to the chaste goddess Diana and her all-female band of huntresses, so the god took Diana's own form to get close to her. The crescent moon and the quiver of arrows here belong to that disguise. Boucher painted it in 1759, at the height of his run as the favourite painter of Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis the Fifteenth and the real arbiter of taste at Versailles. This was exactly the soft, knowing mythology her court wanted on its walls. Within a decade that taste would sour, with critics led by the writer Diderot already calling Boucher's world false and powdered. He kept the king's favour anyway, dying as First Painter to the crown in 1770.