Io1.0010_Correggio

Wikimedia
OGCMA s.v. "Io"

Antonio da Correggio (1489/94-1534) “(Jupiter and) Io” 1530, oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie, inv. no. 274 (64)

A reclining nude woman with red hair looking upwards into swirling clouds and smoke, with a white cloth draped around her hips

Io is enraptured as Zeus surrounds her as a cloud. The face of Zeus is visible in the cloud, as is his right hand. Oak clusters identify him fully. Io has not yet achieved bovine form, because this is the embrace that will shortly be interrupted by Juno's abrupt arrival. As Ovid describes the scene, Juno surveys Arcadia from Olympus figuring that there is too much cloud-cover there at the moment. Correggio recreates that nebulous moment here.
Lovis Corinth in 1920 depicted the same moment with perhapes less taste. Hogarth uses this image of Correggio's Io as a caption in Marriage à la Mode, scene 4, "The Toilette".

Correggio painted this for Federico II Gonzaga.

OGCMA slides are designed by Roger T. Macfarlane for use in Classical Civilization 241 courses at Brigham Young University.
The present resource contains information assembled for The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1400 – 1990’s, edited by J. Davidson Reid (Oxford 1994), and it is used with express permission from Oxford University Press.
Address concerns or inquiries to macfarlane@byu.edu.