Fall of the Giants

In November 1636 Philip IV of Spain ordered the decoration of the Torre de la Parada, a hunting lodge in the oak woods outside Madrid, and Rubens took the whole commission, more than 60 mythological scenes, most of them drawn from Ovid. He was 59 and his hands were increasingly crippled by gout, so he worked the way his Antwerp workshop always had. The inventing happened on small panels like this one, a little over 40 centimetres wide, which were then sent on to other painters to enlarge onto canvas. Jacob Jordaens made the full-size Fall of the Giants from this sketch, and that version hangs in the Prado. The story is four lines of Ovid: the giants pile mountains up to climb into the sky, and a thunderbolt brings the heap down on top of them.