Jupiter Changing Io to a Cow 1665

Editor: Here we have a print titled "Jupiter Changing Io to a Cow" created around 1665 by Georg Andreas Wolfgang the Elder. The level of detail achieved in an engraving of this scale is stunning! There's a stillness, an almost secretive atmosphere, that I find quite compelling. What strikes you most when you look at this piece? Curator: That stillness, that secret – you nailed it! It's the hush before the scandal hits the fan, isn’t it? You've got Jupiter looking rather pleased with himself, Io now a rather bewildered cow, and Juno up there like the world’s most terrifying storm cloud brewing. The fun of baroque art is how dramatic moments like this were captured with such incredible care to line and form. Do you feel that? The anticipation? Or maybe a kind of complicity in looking at it now? Editor: Complicity, definitely! Like overhearing juicy gossip. It's interesting how even the landscape feels like it’s holding its breath. Curator: Precisely! That almost theatrical composition, squeezed into this perfect circle - It gives the image a certain… urgency, like it’s bursting to tell us the full story, while keeping it coyly confined. And consider, too, the function of prints at the time: disseminating images and narratives, spreading the goss like wildfire through early modern Europe! Do you get a sense of the power this relatively small object had back then? Editor: Absolutely! It makes me think about how memes spread today. It is a powerful image. Curator: Right? Just on a classier medium! So, from a bovine beauty to a meme machine… who knew poor Io's story could take so many twists and turns?