Atalanta and Meleager

In Antwerp in the 1610s, this story from Ovid passed through several painters' hands. Abraham Janssens, a fellow Antwerp painter of Rubens's own generation, had painted Atalanta and Meleager in a version now lost, and it probably came first. Around 1616 Rubens turned the subject into this crowded close-up on a wooden panel. Meleager has killed the monstrous boar sent to ravage Calydon, and he offers its head to Atalanta, the huntress he loves, while a hunter behind her blows a horn. Soon afterwards the young Jacob Jordaens took up the same subject, and his painting, now in Antwerp's Royal Museum of Fine Arts, is generally seen as following this one. Behind the couple, half in shadow, looms a snake-haired Fury, a hint at the quarrel over the boar's hide that will end in Meleager's death.