Jupiter and Semele

The story of Jupiter and Semele

Jupiter sits enthroned in full glory, eyes open, surrounded by more ornament than any painting has a right to hold, and across his lap Semele, the mortal who asked to see him as he really was, is dying of the sight. Below them the whole of creation piles up in tiers: gods, monsters, flowers, a figure with a bloody sword, a pale Pan. Moreau finished it in 1895, near the end of his life, and it is in the Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris, the house he turned into his own museum. It took years, and it looks it.

On a wall, this is a tall, dark, glittering column. The dominant colors are deep blue-black and blood red, with jewel tones of green, violet, and gold picked out everywhere in tiny strokes, and Semele's pale body as the one soft note. It suits a bedroom, a study, a stairwell, a powder room, or a hallway, and it fits gothic, maximalist, Victorian, and jewel-box interiors that can take an image this loaded. The image is twice as tall as it is wide, so it wants a narrow wall. The Medium at 16 × 28.9 in is the size to see the detail, and the Small at 12 × 21.7 in works between two doors or beside a mirror.

Moreau's Oedipus and the Sphinx is the calmer, earlier painting that made his name. Klimt's The Kiss is the gold-encrusted embrace painted a decade later, and Blake's The Great Red Dragon is the other vision of a god that hurts to look at. More from Gustave Moreau.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of the Paris canvas, with the deep blacks kept deep so the jewel colors sit inside them as Moreau meant.