The Crowning of the Virtuous Hero

Rubens painted this around 1613 for the Guild of Saint George, the crossbow archers of Antwerp, to hang in their banqueting hall. It is pure allegory. A Roman general is crowned with laurel by winged Victory while he treads on a bound captive and on Discord, whose hair is a nest of snakes. Beside him a figure offers a tied bundle of arrows, the old emblem that many together cannot be broken. Two centuries later the picture was hauled off to France among Napoleon's confiscations. One of the people who worked to win it back for Kassel was Jacob Grimm, better known today with his brother for the fairy tales, and the Rubens came home in December 1815.