Vasari mentions that the commissioner, duke Federico II Gonzaga, wanted to donate the works to emperor and King of Spain Charles V: the fact that the other two works, the Ganymede and Jupiter and Io, were in Spain during the 16th century implies that they were part of the same series.
In another scholium, it is said that the Argonautica's account of Ganymede's abduction by an amorous Zeus (Argonautica 3.114–17) was also modelled on a version by Ibycus (in Homer's earlier account, Zeus abducted the youth to be his wine-pourer: Iliad 20.234), and that Ibycus, moreover, described the abduction of Tithonus by Dawn (Eos).
Ganymede | Ganymede (mythology) | The Ganymede Takeover | Ganymede (moon) | Ganymede (literary journal) |
The Rape of Ganymede is Mazza's best-known painting, and depicts the legendary account of an eagle (either the Aetos Dios or a manifestation of Zeus himself) kidnapping the handsome Ganymede and taking him to Mount Olympus to serve as both Zeus' lover and as cupbearer to the gods.
Among his best-known works are Blind Homer Led by the Genius of Poetry (1851, now in the Metropolitan Museum), Eve, Campagna Shepherd Boy (Peabody Institute), Genius of Painting, Youth and Old Age, Evening Star, Eve Repentant (Wadsworth Atheneum), Washington and Flora, A Monument to Charles Carroll (near Baltimore), Bellsarius at the Porta Pincinia, and Ganymede.
According to a still more ancient tradition Zeus, perceiving that Ganymede longed for his playmates upon Mount Ida, gave him Eros for a companion and golden dibs with which to play, and even condescended sometimes to join in the game (Apollonius).
Scientist Jack Costain (John Saxon) and his aides investigates a meteorite in the British countryside, discovering that it is an alien device from Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter.
This was a sort of florid romance, in two books of six-line stanzas, in the manner of Lodge and Shakespeare, dealing at large with the complaint of Daphnis for the love of Ganymede.
The orbit of Io is also slightly irregular because of orbital resonance with Europa and Ganymede, two of the other Galilean moons of Jupiter, but this would not be fully explained for another century.