The recent cleaning of what was believed to be a relatively straightforward composition of a 17th-century female nude in the collection of the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin, took a turn of mythic proportions when conservators discovered two additional figures: a putto and a recumbent Zeus. They elevate the painting’s main figure from a mere mortal to Danaë, the daughter of a mythical Greek king and the mother of Perseus, a son of Zeus. Scholars have attributed the work to a follower of the French painter Simon Vouet (1590-1649).

The newly discovered figures had been scraped away and painted over at some point after the artist’s death. “[The alterations were probably] done either to hide badly damaged figures or to make the work more marketable and in keeping with the tastes of the 19th and early 20th centuries,” says Colette Crossman, a curator at the museum, who suspected that the painting had been altered. “The composition did not make sense and the subject matter did not connect to the standard [17th-century] iconography,” she says. After discussions, the curators and conservators decided to remove the overpainting and restore the figures.