Mercury bringing Psyche to Mount Olympus

By 1646, when Poelenburgh painted this in Utrecht, the Dutch Republic was a Calvinist country two years from ending its long war with Spain, and its most admired painters were recording its own flat northern light, its townscapes and taverns. This is none of that. It is the closing scene of a Roman story. In the novel by Apuleius later called The Golden Ass, the mortal girl Psyche has survived every ordeal a jealous Venus set her, and Mercury, the messenger of the gods who also led the souls of the dead, now bears her up through a warm southern sky to Mount Olympus, where she will drink ambrosia, become immortal, and marry Cupid. Her name is simply the Greek word for soul, and for centuries the tale was read as the soul's climb toward divine love. Poelenburgh had learned that bright light in Rome and never let it go, and small pale figures set against open air were exactly what northern collectors bought from him.