Achilles discovered Among the Daughters of Lycomedes

This was never meant to end up as a painting. It is a modello in oil on panel, the working design for one of eight tapestries on the life of Achilles that Rubens laid out in the 1630s. A 17th-century painter who drew after the finished hanging summed the scene up in one word, betrayed. Thetis had hidden her son on Scyros, dressed as a girl among the daughters of King Lycomedes, and Odysseus and Diomedes turned up as pedlars with weapons mixed into their wares. Achilles has just put the helmet on and, as the Prado reads him, grasped what he has given away. Deidameia, who loved him and was carrying his child, watches. Behind them Odysseus, in a turban, turns to someone outside the picture with a finger to his lips. The museum's technical account has the workshop laying in the architecture first and leaving the figures' places empty for Rubens. The panel reached the Prado in 1889, with the bequest of the Duchess of Pastrana.