Dânae

The story here is one Venetian painters loved. Danae was locked away by her father, a king warned by an oracle that his grandson would one day kill him, so he shut his daughter in a sealed chamber to keep any suitor out. It did not work. Zeus wanted her and came to her as a shower of gold, and Tintoretto paints exactly that, the reclining woman and the coins falling from above, with a maid kneeling to gather them up. He made it around 1570, in the loose, quick, silvery handling of his maturity in Venice. The canvas came to France long ago. The Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon acquired it in 1811, and it has hung there ever since.