The Danaë story comes from Ovid's account of Perseus. An oracle told King Acrisius of Argos that a son born to his daughter would kill him, so he shut Danaë in a bronze chamber, or in some tellings a tower, to keep her from any man^[1]. Zeus reached her anyway, appearing as a shower of gold that fell into her lap, and Danaë later bore Perseus, the hero who would go on to kill Medusa and, eventually and unknowingly, his grandfather^[1]. The subject let painters combine a female nude, a moment of erotic surrender, and a moral alibi: the woman had, after all, been visited by a god, not seduced by a man. Roman writers already understood the story's usefulness as an excuse. Terence has a young man cite Jupiter's own conduct with Danaë as a defence against a charge of rape^[1]. That double reading, divine visitation and available pretext, ran through every later painted version of the subject.

By the time Carracci painted his Danaë, the subject had already been claimed by Titian, who produced at least five versions between the 1540s and 1550s for patrons including Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and King Philip II of Spain^[2]. Titian's Danaë for Philip was, in the words of one modern art historian, the most frankly erotic of his nudes, its figure accepting Zeus's embrace with no covering drapery at all, casting the viewer as a voyeur^[4]. Titian varied the details between versions: sometimes Cupid gathers the falling gold, sometimes an old nursemaid does, her ugliness a foil to Danaë's beauty^[2]. Carracci, working in Rome a generation later and steeped in the Farnese collections that included Titian's own pictures, inherited this visual vocabulary rather than inventing it. His own reputation, however, rested less on erotic mythology than on the more public, more ambitious Ovidian programme he executed for the Farnese ceiling itself.

Annibale was born in Bologna in 1560, the son of a tailor, and trained first by his cousin Ludovico and then, in engraving, by his brother Agostino^[3][5]. In 1582 the three Carracci founded an academy in Bologna, sometimes called the Accademia degli Incamminati, built around drawing from life and from ancient sculpture, and aimed at pulling Italian painting back from what they saw as the artificiality of Mannerism toward the example of Raphael, Correggio, Titian and the Venetians^[5][6]. Annibale travelled to Parma, to Venice with Agostino, and probably to Florence, absorbing Correggio's soft modelling and Venetian colour before returning to Bologna to help run the family workshop^[6][5]. In 1595 Cardinal Odoardo Farnese brought him to Rome, where his reformed style met the city's classical and antique traditions directly and produced the paintings on which his later reputation would rest.