Diana Returning from the Hunt

Around 1617 Peter Paul Rubens was running the busiest painter's workshop in Antwerp, back from eight years in Italy and flooded with commissions. He rarely worked alone. On this large canvas the figures are his, the chaste goddess Diana and her nymphs coming back from the hunt, but the heap of dead birds and hares and the piled fruit were painted by Frans Snyders, an Antwerp specialist in animals and still life. Two trained hands share one picture, and you can still tell them apart, the warm living flesh against the cool weight of the game. The story turns on appetite. Diana's band has sworn off men, and the satyrs pressing in from the side, half goat and grinning, offer fruit as a bid to tempt them. It is the kind of mythological hunting scene Flemish collectors wanted for large rooms, made to be seen from across a hall.