Redux

To suggest the alien nature of the deity, Correggio had depicted Jupiter in the form of a dark cloud out of which emerges a masculine face with cloudy lips with which to kiss Io's lips and a gray hand with which to clasp her waist. Although the naked Io's posture is awkward, suggesting that she has been caught off guard--her white robe is beneath her buttocks and right arm, as if it has slipped from her shoulders or has been removed by the vaporous deity--she offers her seducer no resistance, and, indeed, seems to enjoy his urgent embrace.

As Correggio depicted Io, she is a young woman, in her twenties, perhaps, of classic beauty. Her face is angelic in its innocence and purity, with large eyes, a fine nose, unremarkable lips, a small chin, a sharp jaw line, and auburn hair swept up in a bun. Her body, although naked, is seen from the rear, offering a view of her smooth, but ordinary back, and the top of her buttocks which are truncated, as it were, by her seated position. Her legs are smooth and shapely. She is not overweight, although she is a bit plump, perhaps, by today's standards of feminine beauty, which call for skeletal versions of womanhood that resemble the female survivors of Auschwitz and Dachau.

In order to exhibit the revised figure's male genitalia, Danielson found it necessary to slightly shift Io's posture, so that she sits upon one of her own calves and ankles, which raises her buttocks just enough to show a glimpse of her testicles and penis, which the artist positions between her legs, purely for the sake of pleasing the patron who has commissioned the work. Except for this "detail," the re-creation of Correggio's work is an exact copy that could hang in place of Correggio's original with no one, perhaps, being the wiser. The penis and testicles, however, are certain indicators that the painting is but a copy--and an altered copy, at that.

The transsexual, or "shemale," as his benefactor insisted upon referring to the model whom Danielson hired for this painting, looked very much like whoever Correggio's model was; other than the male genitals, their resemblance was striking.