达娜厄

Titian returned to this scene again and again over about twenty years, and the Prado holds the loosest, latest version, painted around 1560, when he was past seventy and working with a very free, almost smoky touch. The story is from Ovid. Danaë has been locked in a tower by her father, and the god Jupiter reaches her anyway, coming down as a shower of gold. Titian paints her reclining and open, gazing up, while the gold falls as glinting coins and light from a dark storm cloud. Beside her an old servant scrambles to catch the coins in her apron, and that contrast is the whole point: the young nude lost in the god, the old woman thinking only of the money. Pictures like this were made for Philip the Second of Spain, who kept a private room of them. Titian called such mythologies his poesie, his painted poems, and by this late stage he was dissolving edges and building the flesh almost entirely out of loaded, broken colour.