Jason and the Golden Fleece

Most of the canvases painted for Philip IV's hunting lodge follow Ovid. This one follows a drier source, the Fabulae of Hyginus, a Roman handbook of myths, where Phrixus sacrifices the ram and lays its golden skin in the temple of Mars, with a serpent set to guard it until Jason comes. In Ovid's telling the guardian is a dragon that Jason has to drug. Here there is a temple, and a statue of Mars standing inside it. Svetlana Alpers traced that statue to the Mars Ultor now in the Capitoline Museums in Rome, and the running hero to the Apollo Belvedere, turned away from us. His face is not visible at all. What holds the moment together is the stone god's stare, which follows him out. Erasmus Quellinus painted the canvas between 1636 and 1638 from a sketch by Rubens now in Brussels. Against that sketch he redrew the lines of the floor for a deeper perspective and picked out the veining in the marble columns.