L'origine della Via Lattea

Tintoretto painted this in Venice around 1575 as a myth about how the stars were made. Jupiter wanted his infant son Hercules, born to a mortal woman, to become immortal, so he pressed the baby to the breast of his sleeping wife Juno to steal her divine milk. She woke. The milk that sprayed upward became the band of stars we call the Milky Way, and the drops that fell to earth became lilies. What hangs in London is only the top of the picture. Around 1727 someone cut roughly a third off the bottom, and from an old copy we know it once showed the earth goddess reclining among those lilies below. So the flowers the whole story turns on are the part that was lost.