Perseus Freeing Andromeda

Rubens spent eight years in Italy as a young man, and much of that time he stood in front of ancient marbles with a drawing book, copying them. That habit is working under this picture. The body of Andromeda, chained and just freed, is lifted almost directly from a Roman statue of Venus he had studied in the Vatican, softened here into warm living flesh. Perseus arrives in gleaming armour, the winged horse Pegasus beside him, the sea monster dead at his feet, and small cherubs busy at the edges undoing her bonds and fussing over the horse. It was painted around 1621. More than a century later it entered the collection of Frederick the Great of Prussia, which is how a Flemish painter's Greek myth ended up on a wall in Berlin.