Danae was the mother of the Greek hero, Perseus, courtesy of Zeus. Her father was the king of Argos. The oracle at Delphi told the king that his daughter’s son would murder him, and given that oracles in those days had good track records, the king promptly put Danae in permanent lockdown in a tall bronze tower with a tiny opening for air and light.
Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639) was smitten with Danae’s story since it involved sex — always a crowd pleaser — and gold, attractive in 1623, when Gentileschi painted Danae and the Shower of Gold but coveted anywhere, anytime, especially today given the government’s convincing attempt to murder the economy and impoverish us all. Titian and Rembrandt depicted Danae, too. I picked Gentileschi’s because the Getty purchased his version for $35 million just last year, when museums had money, before the government threw, coincidentally, 35 million people out of work in a few weeks.
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