In the history of art, very few myths have shimmered with such erotic resonance as the myth of Danae, the beautiful imprisoned maiden whom the Greek God Zeus had visited in the form of a shower of gold. This just might be Zeus’ most imaginative way of seducing a woman. At once a tale of confinement and transcendence, chastity and seduction, the myth of Zeus and Danae bursts with sensual ambiguity. To trace the figure of Danae through the eyes of painters, poets and even sculptors is to enter the very pulse of erotic imagination in the Western culture, where female vulnerability and divine desire intertwine under the shimmering sign of gold.
Fig.1 Gustav Klimt, Danae, 1907-08
Fig.2 Auguste Rodin, Danaid, 1889, marble
Forbidden Eroticism
Danae’s story is a paradox of enclosure and excess. Her father, King Acrisius of Argos, locked her in a bronze tower after an oracle warned him that her son would one day kill him. In this sealed space, Danae became the very figure of forbidden eroticism: beauty made inaccessible and desire made taboo. But Zeus was as undeterred as always when it came to sexual escapades and he descended upon her not as thunderbolt, a bull or swan, but as molten radiance, a shower of gold seeping through the cracks of her prison. Already, this form of seduction blurs the lines between violence and caress, between violation and blessing. Gold, the substance of wealth, sunlight, and power, became here the instrument of divine penetration.
Fig.3 Egon Schiele, Danae, 1909
Fig.4 Egon Schiele, Study for Danae, 1909, watercolour, pencil and ink
Descent of Golden Rain
In art, Danae is nearly always depicted at the moment of this descent of golden rain, reclining on a bed, her garments slipping from her body, her skin bathed in the cascading shimmer of Zeus’s metamorphosis. This rain of gold is the main recognisable motif in the Danae iconography so it makes sense why she is always represented this way.
Fig.5 Günther Henry Schulze, Danae
Fig.6 Alexey Golovin, Danae, 2012
Foetal Pose
Perhaps the most famous representation of Danae in the arts comes from the brush of Gustav Klimt. His ‘Danae’, painted in 1907-08, is seen in Fig.1. She is drenched in eroticism; curled in a foetal pose, her eyes closed in the moment of rapture, her juicy thighs spread, while the golden torrent is cascading directly between her legs. There is no coyness and no ambiguity: the golden rain is orgasm itself; shimmering, pure and raw. The gold leaf gleams with the sacred radiance of Byzantine mosaics, yet it coats an act of raw, sensual intimacy. The erotic and the sacred collapse into one in this painting. Klimt’s Danae’ is at once a temple and a lover, an icon and a courtesan, and her pleasure is as luminous as her gilded surroundings.
Fig.7 Léon Comerre, Danae and the Shower of Gold, c 1908
Fig.8 Titian, Danae, 1553-54
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