Peter Paul Rubens
(Flemish, Siegen 1577 - 1640 Antwerp) and workshop,
Tereus’ Banquet,
1636 - 1638, oil on canvas, 195,5 x 266 cm
Museo del Prado
Tereus, King of Thrace and husband of Procne, raped his sister-in-law,
Philomela, cutting out her tongue in order to avoid being denounced. But Philomela wove a tapestry telling her story, and her sister Procne discovered the
atrocious event. In vengeance, she killed Tereus´ son Ytis, serving it to him
in a macabre banquet. The story is based on Ovid´s Metamorphoses
(Book VI). Rubens chose to depict the exact moment when, after having eaten
the dinner served to him, the Thracian king requests his son´s presence.
At that moment, the two women, driven mad in the face of their imminent
vengeance, show him the head of the victim as one more of the plates at
the banquet. This work is very likely the cruelest of the mythological
scenes painted by Rubens for the small palace near Madrid called Torre
de la Parada.
Rubens was commissioned in 1636 to produce sixty mythological paintings for
Torre
de la Parada, which he managed to do in about 18 months, assisted by Jacob Jordaens, Cornelis de Vos, Peter Snayers, Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert, Theodoor van Thulden, Jan Boeckhorst,
Erasmus Quellinus II
and others, working to his designs. Forty of the paintings survive, as well as many of Rubens’ oil sketches and drawings. Most of all these works are in Museo del Prado in Madrid.
I love taking myself out on little dates. One of my best memories in Portland was going to a movie theater in the middle of the day and watching Lady Macbeth while drinking hard cider
