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
Philip IV of Spain (1605–1665) had a passion for hunting and a serious programme of self-presentation. The Torre de la Parada, built in 1635–36 at El Pardo on the outskirts of Madrid around an older sixteenth-century tower, was intended to serve both appetites at once: a working hunting lodge and a theatre of classical mythology, its walls to be covered with scenes from Ovid that would transform a functional royal retreat into something considerably more ambitious. In the autumn of 1636, the commission for its decoration reached Rubens in Antwerp. It was the largest single programme Philip IV ever placed with him, and for Rubens it arrived in the final years of a life already shortened by chronic gout. Rubens responded at a pace that remains remarkable on any account: the oil sketches on toned panels were substantially complete by January 1637, barely two months after the commission was confirmed, and the canvases were largely finished by late that year. The preparatory oil sketches on toned panels were largely complete by January 1637, barely two months after the commission was placed, and the canvases were substantially finished by late that year, the whole enterprise accomplished in under eighteen months.
The original programme envisioned more than 150 paintings in total, combining mythological subjects drawn primarily from Ovid’s (43 BC–AD 17/18) Metamorphoses with hunting scenes and other contributions by Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) and other painters. Of this total, Rubens’s workshop was responsible for approximately sixty mythological canvases.
The method was the one Rubens had refined across decades of studio practice. He prepared a rapid oil sketch on a small toned panel, then handed the design to an assistant to execute at full scale. Among those who painted from his designs were Cornelis de Vos (c.1584–1651), Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678), Theodoor van Thulden (1606–1669), and Erasmus Quellinus the Younger (1607–1678). Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand (1609–1641), the king’s brother and Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, monitored the project in Antwerp and expressed concern at the number of nude figures across the cycle. Rubens acknowledged the objection with characteristic diplomatic ease while making no changes, noting that the works were already too far advanced to alter. The paintings were packed and dispatched to Madrid after drying thoroughly, Rubens having insisted on this delay despite pressure to send them sooner. He died on 30 May 1640 in Antwerp, of chronic gout that had by 1639 left him unable to paint, the condition having by then caused the heart failure that killed him at sixty-two. Of the approximately sixty mythological paintings, around forty survive, most now in the Prado.
This painting is among those Rubens executed entirely himself rather than delegating to the studio, which places it within the smaller autograph core of what was otherwise a largely collaborative enterprise. The subject synthesises two distinct ancient sources. Ovid’s Metamorphoses (I, 168–171) names the Milky Way, the Via Lactea, as the luminous road leading to the palace of Jupiter, without accounting for its formation. The story of how it came into being is recorded in the De Astronomia [On Astronomy], a text attributed to Hyginus but whose authorship and precise date remain disputed among classical scholars. The text preserves several conflicting versions of the myth: in one, Juno unknowingly nurses the infant Hermes; in another, closer to what Rubens depicts, the infant is Hercules, placed at her breast by Jupiter while she slept, so that the child might gain immortality through divine milk. Juno awoke, pulled the infant away, and the milk scattering from her breast formed the galaxy. The Prado catalogue notes that Rubens based the composition on an unspecified work by Titian (c.1488–1576), consistent with his lifelong habit of reworking Venetian prototypes, though the specific source painting has not been identified in the scholarship.
The Brussels modello, preserved in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, shows clearly what Rubens changed between his initial design and the finished canvas. In the sketch, Jupiter is entirely absent and Juno’s lower limbs are positioned differently. In the painting Jupiter appears to the left, inactive, identified by the eagle at his feet gripping a bundle of lightning bolts, watching the event that his own scheming put in motion. The addition of Jupiter does more than fill the composition: it shifts the painting’s internal logic from Juno’s startled reaction toward the convergence of divine forces at a moment that will produce something permanent. The dark ground against which the figures are set presses them forward toward the picture plane with something close to sculptural relief, and the scatter of bright points across the upper canvas makes the cosmic consequence of the scene literal rather than implied. The peacocks drawing Juno’s chariot in the lower right are her traditional sacred animal throughout Roman religious iconography. Their presence is not decorative punctuation but iconographic precision: Rubens’s library at death, recorded in the estate inventory, included a substantial body of classical and antiquarian texts from which he drew directly for such details across the cycle.
What arrests attention before any question about sources is the face. The Prado catalogue states directly that the features of Juno are those of Hélène Fourment (1614–1673), Rubens’s second wife. The identification connects this canvas to the sustained practice of his last decade, in which Hélène’s face and body appear repeatedly in mythological roles at the largest possible scale. Het Pelsken [The Little Fur Coat] (c.1636–38, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), painted at almost exactly the same moment as this canvas, fuses her body with the image of Venus emerging from her bath. Here the same face becomes Juno, queen of heaven and the body through which the galaxy is born. The two paintings together suggest that by the mid-1630s Rubens had arrived at a complete imaginative equation between his wife and female divinity in its fullest range, from the domestic and erotic to the cosmological. That equation was carried out within a private aesthetic that had been developing through the household portraits of the Fourment circle for more than a decade, and which now, in the context of the largest public commission of his late career, found its most expansive expression.
The subsequent history of this painting is as telling as its making. Philip IV died in 1665 and his successor Charles II (1661–1700) had neither the health nor the inclination for hunting; the Torre fell into disuse within a generation of its completion. As the War of the Spanish Succession advanced at the start of the eighteenth century, the best paintings were prudently moved to other royal residences around 1710. In 1714 Austrian troops set fire to the building. The ruins stand to this day in Monte de El Pardo, within a protected natural reserve, inaccessible to the public. The painting was first documented at the Torre in 1701, then traced through the Royal Palace of Madrid in 1772, 1794, and 1814–18. On the death of Ferdinand VII of Spain (1784–1833) it entered the Prado in 1834, where it was placed in the Sala Reservada: the reserved room in which the royal collection kept works considered too indecorous for general public display. That designation is its own kind of commentary. A canvas of Juno modelled on the painter’s wife, made for the private pleasure of a hunting king who saw no conflict between erotic myth and royal self-regard, had become, in the more regulated cultural environment of the nineteenth century, a painting that required controlled access. The distance between those two eras measures something real about how the world in which Rubens worked had ceased to exist.
References
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