Cadmus and Minerva

Ovid gives Cadmus a strange reward. He has just killed the serpent that guarded a spring, and a voice out of nowhere tells him that one day he too will be a serpent. Minerva then comes down through the air and tells him to plough the ground and sow the dead animal's teeth. Jordaens puts both halves of that instruction on one canvas. Cadmus stands at the left with the goddess sweeping in above him, and over on the right the furrows are already sending up armed men who turn on each other as they rise. He painted it in Antwerp between 1636 and 1638 for Philip IV's hunting lodge in the hills outside Madrid, working from a small oil sketch by Rubens that hangs today in a country house in Norfolk. He did not follow it exactly. He turned Cadmus's head further toward Minerva, reworked the trees behind them, and made the soldiers climbing out of the earth larger than Rubens had drawn them.