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Dosso Dossi was court painter to Alfonso I d'Este, duke of Ferrara, and spent much of his career decorating his patron's various residences in and around the city. The Embrace belonged to a series of nine oval panels that were originally set into the gilt ceiling of the duke's bedroom in the so-called Via Coperta, a series of richly furnished apartments that linked the castle to the Palazzo del Corte. The ceiling was dismantled in 1598 and the panels were sent partly to Modena, and partly to Rome. In the seventeenth century the panels were transformed into rhomboid formats, and The Embrace was later cut down into its present octagonal form.
The subject and the meaning of the picture is unclear, but depicting the tight and apparently forcible embrace by a bestial man (a satyr?), dressed in an animal skin, of a struggling naked woman (a nymph?), the picture seems to allude to the sin of lechery.
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