Ganymede and the eagle

myminifactory

The series of Jupiter's Loves was birthed after the triumph of Venus and Cupid with a Satyr. Correggio painted four canvases in total, with others possibly joining later. In the initial edition of his Lives, renowned art biographer Giorgio Vasari mentions only two paintings, Leda (now at the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) and one Venus (believed to be the Danae currently housed in the Borghese Gallery of Rome), although he knew them solely from descriptions provided by Giulio Romano. Vasari notes that the commissioner, Duke Federico II Gonzaga, desired to donate the works to Emperor Charles V: given that the other two paintings, Ganymede and Jupiter and Io, were present in Spain during the 16th century, it's clear they formed part of the same series. British art historian Cecil Gould suggested that Federico had commissioned Io and Ganymede for himself, and only ceded them to Charles V after his death in 1540, possibly as a wedding gift when Philip married; others speculate that Federico ordered them for the Ovid room within his Palazzo Te. Between 1603-1604, Emperor Rudolf II acquired the painting along with Parmigianino's Cupid Making His Arch, and sent it to Prague. The canvas resided in Vienna as early as the 1610s, when mentioned alongside Io in Habsburg imperial collections.