Danaë Watching the Building of the Brazen Tower

Edward Burne-Jones's 1872 painting of Danaë watching the construction of the brazen tower is an early treatment of the myth he would explore at greater scale in later years. In the myth, Danaë's father Acrisius, warned by an oracle that her son would kill him, imprisoned her in a tower of bronze to prevent her conceiving — only for Zeus to penetrate it as a shower of gold, fathering Perseus. The image of a woman observing her own imprisonment being constructed gives the subject a particular melancholy: Danaë watching the mechanism of her fate being assembled. Burne-Jones was drawn to such subjects of fate, confinement, and watching women. Harvard Art Museums hold this early treatment as a document of his developing mythological imagination.

Burne-Jones's early style combines Pre-Raphaelite linearity with his growing interest in Italian Renaissance figure painting. The figure of Danaë would be rendered with the flattened, elongated elegance characteristic of his manner. The architectural construction of the tower provides compositional geometry against which the organic figure is set.