An auction record was smashed for the work of 17th century Italian artist Orazio Gentileschi with his sumptuous depiction of nude "Danae" being showered with gold. The J. Paul Getty Museum won the rare-to-market Baroque masterpiece for $30.5 million at Sotheby’s in New York on Thursday. 

The 1621 painting was a commission from nobleman Giovanni Antonio Sauli for his palazzo in Genoa. The Getty owns another Gentileschi commission for the same patron, titled Lot and His Daughters, and plans to "reunite" the works in the museum's East Pavilion. A third work made for the Genoese palazzo is Mary Magdelene (now in a private collection). "Each touch on different types of love and man’s relationship to God," according to a Getty statement.

“Orazio Gentileschi’s majestic Danae is a masterpiece of 17th-century Italian painting,” said Timothy Potts, director of the Getty Museum. “With its ambitious scale and wonderfully sensual subject, the picture has been heralded as one of the most important Baroque pictures to come to market in recent memory.”

Estimated at $25 million to $35 million, the Gentileschi fell right in the middle of expectations and far exceeded the artist's previous record of $4.1 million set in 2007. Three bidders pursued the work, which carried a guarantee for the consignor. The Old Masters evening sale total came to $53.5 million, just below the low estimate.

The Getty explains the work in a statement:

In Greek mythology, Danaë was the beautiful daughter of King Acrisius of Argos. Warned by an oracle that his daughter’s son would one day kill him, Acrisius banished her to a tower, away from the reach of men. While the imprisonment effectively kept mortal men away, it was no impediment to Zeus. Transforming himself into a shower of gold, Zeus visited Danaë and impregnated her, conceiving the hero Perseus. The theme was popular in classical art, and again in the late Middle Ages, when Danaë was depicted, secluded in a tower, as the image of modesty. During the High Renaissance however, images of Danaë’s story became more erotically charged; it was from the celebrated precedents by Correggio and Titian that Orazio took his cue.

In Orazio’s monumental depiction, Cupid pulls back a luxuriant dark green curtain, allowing Zeus to enter as a shower of gold coins and ribbons. Danaë lies partly covered on a sumptuous red bed with white and gold sheets, the dynamism of the falling coins and ribbons combining with the subject’s sculptural physique and piercing gaze. The picture is also a meticulous study of light, color and surface texture, from the shiny gold coins to the sheen of the fabrics, displaying a range of tones from cool white linen to the deep crimson bed, and the gilt bed frame and artichoke-shaped bed knobs.