Medea Tricks the Daughters of Pelias

Ovid gives Medea two scenes with a cauldron. In the first she makes old Aeson, the father of her husband Jason, young again with her herbs. In the second she turns the same art into a trap. She tells the daughters of King Pelias, who had pushed Jason's father off his throne, that she can do as much for their father, and she proves it by cutting up an old ram, boiling it and lifting out a lamb. The daughters kill the king, and she never brings him back.

This small canvas was long known by the first story, and older listings still call it Medea Rejuvenating Aeson. The museum reads it as the second. It points to the ram and the cauldron, and, far off in the background, to Medea escaping in a chariot drawn by dragons, set there like the last scene of a play. The museum sees in it the esoteric and literary taste of the late 16th century, painted as a night scene full of glinting light and all the equipment of the magic of the time.