Cloelia Passing the Tiber

In the Dutch Republic of the 1600s this Roman story had a political edge. Cloelia, a Roman hostage of the Etruscan king Porsenna, escaped with her companions and crossed the Tiber back to Rome, and Dutch writers liked to compare such young women breaking free with their own provinces breaking away from Spain. The princes of Orange owned several versions, and this one, painted around 1635, was probably the canvas William the Third moved to his palace of Het Loo in 1696. When French armies overran the Republic in 1795 the picture went to Paris, and it was not returned in 1815. For a long time the Louvre gave it to the Antwerp painter Abraham van Diepenbeeck. After a restoration finished in 1993 the museum catalogues it as Rubens and his workshop, perhaps largely by Jan van den Hoecke, possibly with the master's own hand in it.