Danaë (c. 1623): Art, History and Details

Danaë (c. 1623) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Orazio Gentileschi (Italian, 1563–1639).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Danaë’s father feared a prophecy that his grandson would kill him, so he imprisoned his daughter to protect her from suitors. Yet Jupiter, king of the gods, fell in love with Danaë, and he came to her in the form of gold streaming from the sky. Gentileschi adopted Caravaggio’s method of painting directly from models, pulled to the front of the picture plane, which gives the painting a startling, tangible quality. However, the graceful way he handled paint and human gestures lends the work a poetic quality unique to the artist.

Object facts

• Title: Danaë
• Date: c. 1623
• Creator attribution: Orazio Gentileschi (Italian, 1563–1639)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 202.5 x 270 x 9 cm (79 3/4 x 106 5/16 x 3 9/16 in.); Unframed: 162 x 228.5 cm (63 3/4 x 89 15/16 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 16th & 17th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1971.101

A detail from the museum

The gauzy scarf draped over Danaë was a studio prop present in many of Orazio's paintings.

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Spear, Richard E. Caravaggio and His Followers,. [Cleveland]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1971.
• Lee, Sherman E. "The Year in Review for 1971." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 59, no. 1 (1972): 3–46.
• Trafalgar Galleries. In the Light of Caravaggio. London: Trafalgar Galleries, 1976.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.