Jupiter and Ganymede

Ganymede was a shepherd of such beauty that Jupiter fell in love with him and carried him to Olympus, where he made him his cupbearer. Although some seventeenth-century critics considered this plot indecent, it may also have alluded to the death of a young child whose pure soul had been ascended by God. Van Helt-Stockade was active in Amsterdam as a painter of biblical and mythological subjects in the style of classicism. The present painting was probably originally part of the ceiling of a house in Amsterdam.