Prometheus

Prometheus is getting away. He has the stolen fire and he is turning his head back over his shoulder, checking whether the theft has been noticed yet. That is the instant Rubens picked, and it is the rarer half of the story. The familiar image is the punishment that follows, the rock and the eagle and the liver. The panel is 25 centimetres high, one of the small oil sketches Rubens made in Antwerp in 1636 and 1637 so that the full-size canvases for a royal hunting lodge outside Madrid could be worked up from them. Most of those scenes came out of Ovid. This one does not: the sources for Prometheus are Hesiod's Theogony and the play Prometheus Bound, and what the lodge got was a god running downhill with a light in his hand.