Lamentation of christ peter&paul rubens biography

PROMETHEUS writhes in agony as a huge eagle, talons gripping his head and groin, devours his liver. The hero's nude body, powerfully muscled and steeply foreshortened, is chained at the wrist to the rock.

Prometheus lies on blue and white drapery, his of the boulders on the left is a glimpse of an open landscape.

Lamentation of christ peter&paul rubens biography

The earliest mention of this painting is in a laudatory poem composed by the Leiden University professor and acquaintance of Rubens's brother Philip, Dominicus Baudius, who sought to evoke the horrible immediacy of the work, describing the scene as if the bird were alive, and imagining flames jetting from its eyes.

Baudius's poem is dated 7 April 1612, thus providing an terminus ante quern for the commencement of Rubens's work on the painting. As Julius Held observed, a date of 1611-1612 for the painting is also supported by its stylistic resemblance to the Juno and Argus, which not only emplo