Rape of Hippodamia

At her own wedding feast the bride is being pulled away from the table. The guests are centaurs, half horse and half man, and they have been drinking. The story is from Ovid. The marriage of Pirithous, king of the Lapiths, breaks up in a brawl, and Theseus reaches in to get her back. Rubens designed the canvas in 1636 and 1637 for Philip IV's hunting lodge outside Madrid, where dozens of scenes from the Metamorphoses hung together, stories of gods and men run by their appetites, meant to be read by a ruler as warnings. In the 18th century the picture moved to the new Royal Palace in Madrid, and inventories from 1772 onward place it in the apartments of the royal children. It was never sent to the sala reservada, the locked room where the court kept its paintings of nudes.