Danaé

In the Greek Mythology, Danaé (in Greek old Δανάη / Danáê ), girl of Acrisios (king of Argos) and of Eurydice (girl of Lacédémon), is the mother of Persée.

Myth

His/her father imprisons it in a bronze tower when a oracle predicts to him that it would be killed by his grandson. Zeus manages however to be presented to it to allure it in the shape of a rain of gold coins. From this union is born a son, Persée. Courroucé, Acrisios puts his/her daughter and her grandson in a trunk which it throws to the drift. Those arrive to Sérifos, where the king Polydecte, enthusiast of Danaé, tries to force it to marry it. Persée, returning with the head of Jellyfish, changes the king into stone and succeeds in bringing back his/her mother to Argos.

Virgile tells that it goes later in Italy where it founds the town of Ardée. Its grandson Turnus disputes the hand of Lavinia with Énée. Danaé is also mentioned in the Tragédie S of Eschyle, Euripide and Sophocle. It symbolizes the ground suffering from dryness and on which a fertilizing rain goes down from the sky.

Artistic representations

the topic of the gold rain was represented by Titien (1545, museum of Naples), by Mabuse (1527, Alte Pinacotek of Munich), by Orazio Gentileschi (towards 1621, Museum off Art of Cleveland), by Rembrandt (1636, Musée of the Hermitage) and by Giambattista Tiepolo (towards 1736, museum of Stockholm).
has Fontainebleau the Primatice (Francesco Primaticcio, 1504-1570) painted for François Ier a Danaé . The Condé museum of Chantilly has a drawing of the Master on the same subject.
Miss Lange in Danaé is a table of Girodet, painted in 1799 ( Institute off arts of Mineapolis). It represents a stripped young woman collecting in a blue veil of the gold coins falling from the sky. It is acted in fact of an insistent satirical table on with dimensions venal one of a customer dissatisfied with a preceding order. Girodet, in 1798, had already painted a Danée exposed to the Museum of Bildenden Kunsten of Leipzig.
Gustav Klimt also represented in 1907 - 1908 the erotic topic of manner , gold the rain slipping between the bent thighs of a stripped young woman, her face suggesting the extase in love. The positioning of heroin in an ovoid white form symbolizes fruitfulness (see opposite).
In October 2007, following a ordering of the Louvre (Paris), Anselm Kiefer, painter and German sculptor, installs his Danae in one of the niches of the northern staircase of the square Court of Louvre, where it forms the left part of a triptych, which includes/understands also Athanor (in the center) and Hortus conclusus (on the right).

Sources

(II, 4,1-4).
(IV, 5).
(VI, 53; VII, 61,150).
(LXIII).
(IV, 611; VI, 113; XI, 117).
(II, 20,10; II, 32,59).
(VII, 410).

See too

Simple: Danaë

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