Petrifying Gazes

Of all the ancient myths where rain plays an important role, the
impregnation of Danae by Zeus through a golden rain is perhaps the one
most often depicted in art. This essay is dedicated to the artistic
afterlife of the myth, with special focus on the painting of Danae
(1527) by Jan Gossaert van Mabuse (1478-1532).











Gossaert's Danae is a sophisticated articulation of outer and
inner discourse: the hard, dry, background, with its eclectic
architecture, in contrast with the sweltering, moist, foreground with
the figure's naked body. This essay develops Gossaert's complex
phantasmata surrounding architecture, decoration, and the female
body in three spaces: the intimate space of impregnation, the
psychosomatic space, and, third, the petrifying space of Medusa.












Barbara Baert writes:





"Danae is the living emanation of painting as the uttermost
exhibitionistic medium. Her unveiled skin fragile exposed in the midst
of an overwhelming symphonic outburst of details, facades, windows.
Danae: martyr of glossy materials - marble and flesh - unable to
disappear in her own skin; held hostage within a medium of walls. Her
only desire is to disappear in the ultimate thin membrane, to vaporize
beyond the harsh brocks and, then, at the very end, leave the medium of
textile too. There were threads become drippings, lines become tears."