Correggio’s deeply sensual depiction of Jupiter and Io is lifted from the pages of Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses. Jupiter, the king of the Gods, has an insatiable sexual appetite, and takes on various disguises in order to conceal his identity. These include a swan (for the seduction of Leda), an eagle (for the abduction of Ganymede) and a shower of gold (for the entrapment of Danaë). He first sees the young nymph Io as she returns from her father’s stream. He approaches her, in his own guise, and beckons her into the woods. She flees, only for him to swoop down cloaked in a dark cloud in order to seduce her. Wrapped in his shadowy, nebulous clutches, her eyes half closed and her mouth half open, Io surrenders to Jupiter’s advance. A masterpiece of the High Italian Renaissance, this was one of a group of four paintings commissioned by Frederico II. of Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, for a stately room at the Palazzo del Te.
Coreggio’s painting of Jupiter and Io was a favourite work of Austrian artist Birgit Jürgenssen among the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Her own untitled work which now hangs next to it, made more than four centuries later, takes as its source a story from the same work as Ovid. Pygmalion, a sculptor, falls in love with an ivory statue that he has carved, and which he names Galatea. The goddess Aphrodite brings the statue to life in answer to his prayer. The story provided the basis for George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, later adapted into the film and musical My Fair Lady. It has also inspired artists across the centuries, and was the subject of both painted and sculpted versions by the French academic artist Jean-Léon Gérôme. It is one such version, painted around 1890 and today in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, that Jürgenssen includes in her work. Untitled belongs to a group of large photographic works, in which several printed panels are held together by a metal frame and overlaid with a thin veil of gauze fabric. The fabric has the effect of binding them into a single tableau, while also imbuing them with a sensual, almost sculptural quality. This sense of transition, of moving between one state and another, is further accentuated by the swinging lights in the lower centre panel. The work like Pygmalion’s statue, is brought to life.