Aesop's fable: The Lion and the Mouse

The Buen Retiro, the palace Philip IV raised on the eastern edge of Madrid in the 1630s, is where this canvas is first documented. In the 1772 inventory it is number 412, a lion caught in a net, Flemish school, no painter named. When the appraisers came back in 1794 for the estate of Charles III, they wrote it down as a Rubens. It is by Frans Snyders, and it gives the second half of Aesop's fable: the lion thrashing in the hunters' cords while the mouse he once let go gnaws through them. The Prado will date it no more closely than the first half of the 17th century. By 1857 the museum's own inventory had the story straight, and put the mouse at work on the rope into the entry itself.