Danaë and the brazen Tower

Painted in 1872, Danaë and the brazen Tower is a work by Edward Burne-Jones, now in the collection of Ashmolean Museum, that reflects the artistic concerns of the late 19th century — an era of fundamental transformation in both the methods and purposes of European and American painting. Edward Burne-Jones was the finest painter of the second generation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, transforming Rossetti's romantic medievalism into a sustained aesthetic vision of rare coherence and beauty. His paintings and designs — for tapestries, stained glass.

Burne-Jones painted with smooth, enamel-like precision on fine-grained canvases, building his medieval dreamscapes in carefully modeled glazes. His palette is characteristic — muted roses, cool blues and greens, pale golds — recalling medieval tapestries and stained glass.