In the first edition of his Lives, late Renaissance art biographer Giorgio Vasari mentions only two of the paintings, Leda and the Swan (today at the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) and one Venus (presumably the Danae currently in the Borghese Gallery of Rome), although he knew them only from descriptions provided by Giulio Romano.

Vasari mentions that the commissioner, Duke Federico Gonzaga II of Mantua, wanted to donate the works to emperor and King of Spain Charles V: that the other two works, Ganymede Abducted by the Eagle and Jupiter and Io, were in Spain during the 16th century implies that they were part of the same series.

British art historian Cecil Gould suggested that Federico had commissioned the Io and Ganymede for himself, and that they were ceded to Charles V only after the duke's death in 1540, perhaps on occasion of the marriage of the king's son, Philip;[2] other hypothesized that Federico ordered them for the Ovid room in his Palazzo Te.

Indeed, the Duke of Mantua, Federico Gonzaga, wanted to place the painting and its companion pieces in a room dedicated to the loves of Jupiter.

Noteworthy is the contrast between the evanescent figure of the immaterial Jupiter, and the sensual substance of Io's body, shown lost in an erotic rapture which anticipates the works of Bernini and Rubens.