Redux

Today, Stormy Danielson was re-creating the late Renaissance's Antonio Allegri da Correggio's Jupiter and Io. Danielson's re-creation was to remain true to the original in every way but one--the same detail, if one could call such a feature a mere "detail"--that his anonymous billionaire patron had ordered in commissioning the series of works upon which the artist was now hard at work. The painter thought that his benefactor's obsession with such a "detail" was ludicrous, but the patron considered it the very mark of genius. That such a feature could improve upon Correggio's masterpiece--or any of the other great painters' works which Danielson had been commissioned to re-create--was preposterous. Nevertheless, art had fallen upon hard times, and a man, even a painter as brilliant as Danielson, must eat and pay the rent.

Therefore, with the greatest reluctance, and barely able to conceal the horror of his sponsor's idea, Danielson had agreed to the terms of his commission, which was to replace the woman in each painting with a male-to-female transsexual who had decided to retain her male genitals rather than to deliver them to the plastic surgeon's scalpel. Jupiter and Io was the first in a series of three such re-creations that Danielson had agreed to paint.

Displayed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria, Correggio's masterpiece was a companion piece to Ganymede Abducted by the Eagle, a homoerotic work celebrating the seizure of the Greek youth by Zeus in the form of a mighty raptor who carried him off to Mount Olympus. Jupiter and Io was itself inspired by the seduction, by Jupiter (or Zeus, as he was known by the Greeks), of the princess Io, as the story is recounted in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The original oil painting was created for Federigo Gonzaga, the first duke of Mantua, who had intended to decorate a room of his palace with The Loves of Jupiter. The amorous god was supposedly a distant ancestor of the Gonzaga family and a great womanizer like the duke himself.