Die Wildschweinjagd

Rubens painted this around 1615, at the height of his fame, when Europe's princes wanted big, violent hunting scenes for their palaces. The hunt was the sport of rulers, a stand-in for war in peacetime. He built the tangle of men, dogs and cornered boar out of something he had studied closely in Italy: Leonardo's lost Battle of Anghiari, a wall of straining muscle and fury that survived only in copies. Here that energy is turned loose in a dark forest. Two hunters wrestle the boar at the centre while the hounds pile in, and the whole mass seems about to burst out of the frame. Rubens made a whole run of these hunts in these years for patrons like the Duke of Bavaria, each with different quarry, from boar to lions, tigers, even a hippopotamus.