Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), The creation of the Milky Way (Ovid, Metamorphoses, I, 168-171), 1636-1638, Oil on canvas, 181.0 x 244.0 cm, Prado Museum, Madrid, on short loan to the Dulwich Gallery, London
Rubens’s Creation of the Milky Way is a painting that makes the heavens themselves feel precarious and human. Produced for Philip IV’s Torre de la Parada, it formed part of a vast mythological cycle intended to transform a royal hunting lodge into a theatre of classical learning and sensual spectacle. Few commissions of Rubens’s later years demanded such invention, or carried so much weight: more than a hundred subjects were planned, only sixty completed, and just a handful—this among them—reworked and signed by the master himself.
The subject is drawn from a tangle of ancient sources. Ovid mentions the Milky Way only in passing as the road to the council of the gods. Hyginus, adapting earlier traditions, tells instead of Juno tricked into nursing a child not her own—whether Hercules or Mercury differs by account—whose feeding leads to spilled milk across the night sky. Rubens departs from all of them. His Juno is neither deceived nor unwilling. Instead she becomes the pivot of the scene, her body turned to the child, while Jupiter looms beside her, a presence added only in the final version. The result is less a literal retelling than an imaginative reconstruction of cosmic origins, reshaped to fit both artistic instinct and the symbolic needs of Philip’s court.
Comparison with the modello in Brussels makes the painter’s intervention clear. The adjustments are not minor details but a complete recalibration of the narrative, shifting attention from the intimacy of nursing to the cataclysmic spilling of milk that forms the Milky Way. The change transforms a private act into a cosmic event, binding the domestic and the divine into a single spectacle.
What emerges is Rubens at his most ambitious: myth taken as living matter, recomposed through paint into a vision that is as much about earthly passion as celestial creation. The face of Juno, unmistakably modelled on his young wife Hélène Fourment, reminds us that Rubens never separated myth from life. In this painting, the sky itself is born out of a marriage between imagination, desire, and the painter’s command of narrative.