A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools / Including by Special Permission Notes Collected from the Works of John Ruskin

by Unknown

32. THE RAPE OF GANYMEDE.

School of Titian. See under 4.

Ganymede—so the Greek story ran—was a beautiful Trojan boy beloved of Jupiter, and was carried off by an eagle to Olympus to be the cup-bearer of the gods. Which things, say some, are an allegory—for "those whom the gods love die young," and are snatched off, it may be, in sudden death, as by an eagle's swoop.

Flushed Ganymede, his rosy thigh
Half-buried in the Eagle's down,
Sole as a flying star shot thro' the sky.

Tennyson: Palace of Art.

This picture was painted, like Tintoret's "Milky Way" (1313) and the four Veroneses (1318, 1324-6), for a compartment of a ceiling. It corresponds with a picture described by Ridolfi as painted by a scholar of Titian, though some connect it rather with Tintoret (see J. B. S. Holborn's Tintoretto, 1903, pp. 34, 35). It was formerly in the Colonna Palace: the background is a restoration by Carlo Maratti (see 174).