In the painting, the father of the gods appears seated on a cloud, with unloosed lightning bolts in his hand, while an eagle appears at his feet. Facing him stands a young woman who falls backward, bringing her left hand to her forehead. Eros, who appears in the lower left corner of the composition with his quiver full of arrows and his bow disassembled, covers his face with his hands so as not to look, while a cherub seems to arrive on the scene from the opposite corner of the painting to prevent the worst from happening.
Mythological tales, in fact, narrate that Semele, daughter of the king of Thebes Cadmus, died incinerated by the lightning bolts of Jupiter after imploring him to show himself to her in all his power. From their union, however, Dionysus-Bacchus was born, who would be saved only thanks to the intervention of his father, who promptly extracted the fetus from the mother’s womb in flames, to insert it into his thigh, where it remained until the moment of birth.
The imprudence of the god’s young lover is, therefore, to be read as an invitation to the guests of the palace to maintain due respect and decorum with the master of the house, whose trust and munificence had to be constantly earned and deserved, without ever forgetting the power that he had reached and that had been granted to him by divine will.
Observing the painting carefully, moreover, attentive guests could grasp, once again, the clear political vision of the Arese family, which here reaffirmed its loyalty to Spain. Jupiter, in fact, is depicted with the features of Philip IV of Habsburg, King of Spain and Governor of Milan, known to his contemporaries as a man extremely attentive to protocol, a lover of royal dignity and impassive in public. A king, therefore, little accustomed in adulthood to frivolities and whose manifestations of anger were to be feared.
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