If you ranked the women in mythology most screwed over by Jupiter, Io is a strong argument for the top spot.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the version of her tale this painting is based on, Jupiter pursued her and, as usual, didn’t care about consequences or consent. She tried to run, but he overtook her in the form of a dark cloud. A strange choice of form, but still not as odd as his Danae encounter.

Jupiter likely thought his cloud form was a clever idea to hide his infidelity from Juno. He didn’t realize that a dark cloud chilling on its own, far from the sky was incredibly suspicious. When Juno arrived to disrupt the encounter she didn’t see the beautiful naked woman trapped in his embrace as Correggio has depicted here. Instead, she saw a cow. Jupiter wasn’t good at improvising.

Juno asks for the cow, and Zeus, unable to think of an excuse, hands over Io. To briefly summarize the rest of Io’s messed up life, Mercury rescues her from Juno, but she stays stuck in cow form while being constantly stung by a gadfly who chases her around the world. She does get back to her human form eventually and she has a son with Jupiter. 

This work was one of a series of paintings on Jupiter’s loves by Correggio. Another painting in the series, Leda and the Swan, made its way into the Orleans Collection with a copy of Jupiter and Io. Louis d'Orléans was quite religious and not fond of the overly sexual paintings so... he took a knife to them. Leda’s face was destroyed and the painting cut into four pieces. The Jupiter and Io copy had Io’s head cut out. Both paintings have since been restored. Luckily, the original was countries away and so far hasn’t been threatened with a stabbing.