Boreas Abducting Oreithyia

By the later 1610s Rubens was back in Antwerp after eight years in Italy, running the busiest painting workshop in northern Europe and turning Greek myth into something muscular and immediate. The story here comes from Ovid. Boreas, the north wind, a Thracian god with grey hair and great wings, had asked for Oreithyia, daughter of the king of Athens, and been refused. So he simply seized her, snatching her up into the air. Rubens gives the wind god an old man's body and heavy wings, and the girl the twisting weight of someone carried off against her will. The canvas later entered the collection of Count Lamberg, whose bequest founded much of the Vienna academy gallery that holds it now.