Jupiter and Semele

The story of Jupiter and Semele is told in the third book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The god Jupiter takes the mortal woman Semele as his mistress and makes her pregnant. When Jupiter’s wife, the goddess Juno, finds out, she disguises herself as Semele’s old nurse and suggests to Semele that her lover may not really be Jupiter. She tells Semele to ask Jupiter to come to her in the form he has when he visits Juno. Jupiter arrives as a mighty thunderbolt armed with fire and Semele is burned to ashes.Here, Jupiter swoops down ringed by stormy grey clouds. Golden light burns behind him and red flames spurt from his hands and feet. An eagle – a form Jupiter takes for his seductions – flies with him towards Semele, who lies waiting, naked on her bed. She gazes dreamily into the distance, unaware of the terrible fate that awaits her. The folds of her red bed-hangings echo the shape and colour of Jupiter’s flames.The picture is painted on a wooden panel and was probably originally incorporated into a piece of furniture such as a bed. The lines of the floor tiles indicate that the painting was intended to be seen from below. The paint has become translucent over time, making the clouds appear patchy, and the shadowed areas of Jupiter’s cloak are extensively crackled from the shrinking of the oil-rich paint. Some of the paint may also have changed from its intended colour: the dark brown tree to the left may have originally been green.The subject of Jupiter and Semele is not very common in painting but in mid-sixteenth century Venice it sometimes appeared in the decoration of ceilings and furniture. This painting may be by Tintoretto; one of his earliest works was an octagonal ceiling canvas of the same subject for the palace of Vettore Pisani in Venice (Galleria Estense, Modena).This panel seems to have been part of a series illustrating other stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Two other paintings thought to be from the same series, Latona changing the Lycian Peasants into Frogs and Apollo and Diana killing the children of Niobe (Courtauld Institute Gallery, London), are of the same height, painted on wood from the same tree and marked with the same stamp on the back. A panel of Argos and Mercury, the present location of which is unknown, may also have belonged to this set.